The Referral, the English-Only Test, and the Missing Bilingual Evaluator

The exclusionary factors are live here, not boilerplate. Eligibility requires ruling out limited English proficiency and lack of appropriate instruction as the explanation for the gap. Two facts point toward language acquisition rather than disability: 18 months of exposure is well within the normal range for academic-English development, and her conversational fluency with weak academic vocabulary is the classic profile of a student still acquiring cognitive academic language.

The current data cannot answer the question. A WISC-V given in English to a student with limited academic English measures English proficiency as much as reasoning, and one English CBM is a single data point. Neither is a non-discriminatory assessment, and neither has been compared to true peers-other English learners with similar exposure, not the class median of 90.

What the team needs. Native-language and English measures of the same skills, a minimum of six to eight weeks of documented Tier 2 intervention with progress monitoring in both languages, classroom and ESL observations, and a parent interview covering schooling history and first-language development. If Ana responds to intervention, the referral should be withdrawn.

Not automatically acceptable, but not automatically wrong. The evaluation timeline is real, and the district cannot let the absence of bilingual staff become an indefinite delay-staffing shortages do not excuse a failure to evaluate. At the same time, rushing an invalid evaluation is not a lawful shortcut; an assessment administered in a language the student does not command is not a valid basis for eligibility.

Weigh the alternatives on the record:

• Contract an outside bilingual school psychologist, even at added cost. This is usually the correct answer when the timeline and the validity requirement collide.
• Use a bilingual extension or trained interpreter with a nonverbal measure-useful as one data source, but a nonverbal IQ score alone cannot determine whether reading failure is language-related.
• Continue high-quality intervention and progress monitoring now, and reconvene when the data can distinguish inadequate instruction from disability.

What must be documented is why the delay exists, what is being done instructionally in the meantime, and when the team will reconvene. The instructional piece is not a placeholder-it is the evidence the team will need either way.

Treat the intervention as a test of the competing hypothesis. The team's uncertainty is whether Ana's low reading reflects a disability or a still-developing second language combined with gaps in instruction. A well-run intervention answers that empirically. If her word-reading and vocabulary grow at an adequate rate with explicit, scaffolded instruction, language is the explanation and no disability should be found. If she plateaus despite faithful implementation, the case for evaluation strengthens considerably.

Design features that make the data interpretable:

• Explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, and academic vocabulary, with Spanish cognates and first-language support where possible, so the student is not asked to learn to read and learn English simultaneously without scaffolds.
• Small-group Tier 2, three to five times weekly, delivered by someone trained in the program, with fidelity recorded.
• Frequent progress monitoring-weekly probes in word reading and vocabulary-plus a Spanish-language measure so the team can see whether the same weakness appears in both languages.

The link to eligibility: progress data gathered now will be the strongest evidence at the eligibility meeting, whichever way it points. Without them, the team will be guessing in March.