How to Get Your Child Tested for Dyslexia in Sacramento

What age a child can be tested for dyslexia

Screening starts in kindergarten. Since the 2025 to 2026 school year, California public schools screen children in kindergarten through second grade for signs of reading difficulty, including dyslexia, and send parents the results within 45 days. If the letter from school says your child is at risk, I wrote a full post on what that letter means.

Under state law, a school screening only flags potential risk. It isn’t a formal diagnosis and can’t be used to determine special education eligibility. Getting real answers requires a comprehensive dyslexia evaluation. According to the International Dyslexia Association, diagnostic testing for reading, decoding, and spelling begins to be useful halfway through first grade (around January or February), once a child has had some formal reading instruction. We provide full evaluations for students from the middle of first grade all the way through adulthood.

How to request a dyslexia evaluation from your child’s school

The school route starts with a letter. A parent can refer a child for a special education assessment at any time, and the request should be in writing and dated. Email it to the principal and the district’s special education director on the same thread, so the clock starts in both offices on the same day. Keep a copy. These are state deadlines, so every Sacramento-area district follows them, from Sacramento City Unified to Elk Grove to San Juan.

Once the district receives your written request, two deadlines start.

• Within 15 calendar days, the district has to give you a proposed assessment plan that lists which areas it will test and who will do the testing. You sign it to give consent.
• Within 60 days of receiving your signed consent, the district has to finish the assessment and hold the IEP meeting where the team reviews the results.

School breaks longer than five days don’t count toward either deadline. Two end-of-year rules matter too. If your request arrives 10 days or less before the school year ends, the assessment plan isn’t due until 10 days into the next school year. If it arrives 30 days or less before the end of the school year, the district has until 30 days into the next school year to hold the IEP meeting. Either way, a request sent in May can wait until fall. A private assessment runs on your calendar instead.

A school cannot make you wait through a semester of reading intervention before it evaluates. Federal guidance from the U.S. Department of Education says response-to-intervention programs cannot be used to delay or deny a full evaluation, and California’s own dyslexia guidelines repeat it. If a staff member suggests waiting to see how the reading group goes first, you can decline and keep your written request standing.

Two more things to know before the meeting. First, the school evaluation decides whether your child is eligible for special education under a category, and reading problems fall under Specific Learning Disability. The report does not have to say the word dyslexia. Second, it can. Federal guidance states that nothing in IDEA prohibits using the term, and the California Dyslexia Guidelines describe school psychologists as essential members of the process for identifying students with dyslexia. So ask directly, in the meeting and in writing, whether the team identified dyslexia.

What a private dyslexia assessment gives you that a school evaluation does not

A school evaluation is built around one question: does this child qualify for services right now? A private dyslexia assessment is built around a different one: what exactly is going on with this child’s reading, and what type of remediation will work best?

A full dyslexia assessment looks at phonological processing, decoding of real and nonsense words, reading fluency, spelling, rapid naming, and comprehension. When the pattern is dyslexia, the report says so, identifies the specific profile, and lays out the intervention plan that matches it.

A private report also carries weight at school. Under federal special education law, if you share a privately obtained evaluation with the district, the district has to consider it in decisions about your child’s education, as long as it meets the district’s criteria. That is what families use when the school report came back vague, or when they want the word dyslexia on the record before the IEP meeting.

What dyslexia testing costs in Sacramento

A school district evaluation is free. That includes the testing, the report, and the IEP meeting.

Private testing is where the price varies. A full neuropsychological evaluation from a psychologist, which covers attention, memory, and cognitive functioning along with reading, can cost thousands of dollars and is often not covered by insurance. A dyslexia assessment from a reading specialist costs a fraction of that and answers the reading question directly. Our current pricing is on the assessment page. If you want the full neuropsychological picture and the cost is out of reach, the next section covers the one route that can get the district to pay for it.

What to do if you disagree with the school’s evaluation

You have a right to a second opinion at the district’s expense. If the school finishes its evaluation and you disagree with the results, you can request an Independent Educational Evaluation, called an IEE, paid for by the district. Under the federal rule the district then has two choices. It can pay for the outside evaluation, or it can file for a due process hearing to prove its own evaluation was appropriate. It cannot simply say no. If the district wins that hearing, you can still get an outside evaluation at your own expense, and the district still has to consider it. I go deeper on what to do when a district refuses or drags its feet in the evaluation request guide I wrote for READ Academy of Sacramento, the school I founded.

If the district refuses your original request to evaluate at all, it owes you prior written notice, a written explanation of what it refused, why, and what information it used to decide. Ask for it by name. A refusal in writing is something you can act on. A refusal in a hallway conversation is not.

What to do after your child’s dyslexia test results come back

If the results point to dyslexia, two things happen next, and they happen at the same time. The first is paperwork. The report supports a request for an IEP, or for a 504 plan if your child does not qualify for special education, since a 504 plan does not require that finding. The second is teaching. An IEP by itself does not teach a child to read, which I have written about at length for READ Academy of Sacramento. Accommodations help a child keep up in class. Structured literacy instruction is what changes the reading, and the longer it waits, the longer it takes.

If the results do not point to dyslexia, you have still learned something. The assessment shows which reading skills are weak and whether the likely cause is missing instruction, a language difficulty, or something that calls for a different specialist. Either way, the testing is the start of the plan, and a parent holding a clear report can act on it.