Private Clinic
In San Antonio, we run a private clinic out of our office. This allows parents, individuals, or organizations seeking to help a struggling learner access to a team that normally would reside in a school. These services range from evaluations, therapy, and counseling. At the root of it, we seek to ensure that an individual can succeed at learning.
Learners come in all forms, preschool kids, school-aged kids, college students, adult students and everyone in between. Learning applies to not only school but to the developmental tasks needed to flourish in our lives.
AIM knows that not all learners can get support from a public school system, where the majority of this evaluation/therapy happens. We also know as many families turn to medical providers, there is a difference between the way learning issues are identified and treated in the medical world and the educational world. They speak different languages. Learners and their families are often caught in the middle. We are built for learners who couldn’t or wouldn’t use a school for testing and diagnosis. My, how times have changed.
Now, a typical AIM customer visits the office for:
Learning evaluations for private school students
Autism evaluation
ADHD evaluations
Testing for communication disorders
Updated testing for accommodations in college
Testing for accommodations on things like SAT, MCAT, LSAT, etc
IEEs
Complex, overlapping issues or differential diagnosis - Is the issue - dyslexia or AD/HD? Is this depression or a learning disability?
Further exploration of a medical diagnosis
At a traditional clinic, these services would have the intention of ‘solving’ the issue. At AIM, we not only want to help remedy the issue, but also find a way to ensure success in the educational setting.
Foundation
We are focused on solving even the toughest cases. Before we start any evaluation, we listen to your needs. We listen to your challenges and successes and fears. We want to make sure we are the right fit for what you need. We then custom tailor the evaluations to fit you. We know a ‘one size fits all' approach doesn’t work. If we think we aren’t the right place for you, we will tell you that. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll help you find what is.
Bridging Medical and School
Ideally, there should be no gap between what your doctor says and what your school says. Realistically, we all know it’s not that simple. One of the benefits of being “in the field” for so many years is that we understand the school system inside and out. Our professional lives exist on the boundary between clinical practice and school law. We have lived through the legal and philosophical confusion of when medical-meets-educational. Our team works to build understanding between the medical model and the legal school model so students don’t get caught in the middle. We want you to get you the help you need personally and professionally.
Private Evaluations
AIM offers private evaluations to families. These evaluations can cover a variety of academic/behavioral concerns that a family might have about a student. We have Licensed Psychological Associates and Licensed Psychologists who are able to conduct assessments in the areas of learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and emotional/behavioral disabilities. We also have speech therapists and bilingual speech therapists who can conduct private speech/language evaluations.
Private Speech Therapy
In our private clinic, AIM can cover all your speech and language therapy needs.
Receptive and Expressive Language
Pragmatic Language
Articulation
Fluency and Voice
Want to know more about our Evaluations?
IEEs
AIM provides high quality Independent Educational Evaluations (IEEs). An IEE can be requested by parents when they disagree with an evaluation that has been completed at their child’s school or if they would like a second opinion. Our IEEs provide a neutral third-party evaluation that schools and parents can both be confident about. Since we have great relationships with schools across the state, and all of our evaluations have extensive experience working in the schools, we are on many of the IEE lists given to parents.
If we are not on your school’s IEE Provider list, you can ask your school to consider adding us to their list. We provide IEEs for virtually every type of evaluation. IEEs are different from Private Evaluations, as IEEs are paid for by the school district, at no cost to the parent, and the results are provided directly to the school as well as the parent. On the other hand, Private Evaluations are paid for by parents, and parents can decide with whom they will share the evaluation.
Free Consultation
We provide a free consultation here at our office. During the consultation we listen between the lines. What has worked? What hasn’t? What worry keeps you up at night? We know that you most likely have a nagging suspicion that ‘something’ is wrong but it’s something that only you can see. You feel like you need to solve it so that your child doesn’t spend years going through school struggling. You need to solve it so you don’t miss your chance at higher education. Maybe your worst fear is not knowing what to do when you or your child hits a roadblock that you can’t detour around.
Evaluator
We hand pick our evaluator to provide the best fit with the needs of your situation. We choose them based on their expertise, background, and experience working with cases similar to what you’re needing. Once the evaluator is assigned, they will reach out to your family and schedule a meeting so they can begin testing. And parents, don’t worry if your student is difficult to connect with, tends to be defiant, is hyper or messy or silly or whatever. We are experts in all of that. It’s what we DO. We’re real people. Maybe we even WERE that kid. We get you.
Testing
Remember when we just wanted to know an IQ score? One score? We don’t just look at one score. Not one of us can be represented by just one number. Thank Goodness. We look at different scores, profiles, and explore how they interact with each other. We also look at things from the school’s point of view and your perspective as a parent. We perform a wide array of tests (to kids it’s like games) to uncover the information. We sample each concept several different ways so we can be confident in our results.
Additional services that are offered include dyslexia intervention services, private speech therapy services, OT services and counseling services.
Interpretation
This is the most important part of the whole process. We call it a parent interpretation, but it’s really a meeting to go over the results. We break down the information in the report so that you understand what it all means. To a lot of people the report is ‘mumbo jumbo’ and we know that can be really overwhelming and unhelpful. That’s why we will spend as much time as you need to go over the report. You can ask unlimited – yes, unlimited – questions. Not only that, if you need time to digest everything or think of questions later, you can always give us a call or email us after the interpretive meeting.
What now?
So the daunting question is “What comes next?” Well it really depends on what you hoped to get out of the evaluation. For some parents, they just want to ‘know’ their child better. And that’s fantastic! For some adult students, they just need guidance as they make decisions about secondary education. Some individuals need more intensive intervention. In our reports we make recommendations that talk about what you can do to help build ‘ramps’ for your child so they can overcome their roadblocks in learning.
For some learners, these recommendations may need the school’s help. That’s why we write our reports just like schools do. Take the report to the school so they can see the results as well. If they have any questions they can give us a call and we will handle the discussion from there. We have built incredible relationships with a huge number of schools across Texas.
What can I do?
If you believe your child has a learning disability or has been previously diagnosed with a learning disability, we are happy to provide a free consultation to listen to your concerns, review the evaluations you have, and guide you in the right direction for next steps.
Other Evaluations
Assessment for Counseling
Intellectual Evaluation
Academic Evaluation
Psychological Evaluation
Emotional Disturbance Evaluation
Speech Evaluation
Evaluation for Attention issues
Functional Behavioral Evaluation (FBA)
Occupational Therapy Evaluation
Assistive Technology Evaluation
Evaluation for Auditory Impairment
Evaluation for Vision Impairment
Independent Evaluation
Special Education Consultation
Special Education Reevaluation
Gifted and Talented Testing
In Home Training and Parent Training Evaluation
In accordance with 22 TAC 463.8(f), information regarding the differences in training and education of Licensed Psychological Associates (LPA) vs. Licensed Psychologists (LP) can be found here:
https://www.bhec.texas.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/LPA-brochure_BHEC.docx