Yes, most likely. Go to Ortho.

I take my kids to the Dentistry school. Graduating students are overseen by faculty, kinda likes residency program. Lots cheaper. $3k for the entire program- whatever they need.

They started with headgear at night. Then spacers, now one of the kids has front braces.
The steps help. Apparently a child’s mouth can be manipulated more than an adults. Better to start young.

Follow up: Both orthodontists agreed she needs a pallet expander and braces since her teeth are already shifting off center and into the space her fang fell out of. On the xrays you can see the adult fang on one side has no where to go. So they need to shift the teeth around to make a hole for it and get her teeth centered again.

We really liked one ortho we met with and three of our friends rave about him. He is a board certified ortho. Our neighbor dentist had him do braces for his wife and kid.

Should I call our current dentist to tell him thank you for bringing this up but we are going to go with orthodontist whose office is closer to school?

How have people communicated orthodontist choices to dentist - especially if they had proposed doing it themselves?

This sounds a lot like what we went though w/ our kids/ortho... Basically the sales pitch was it's easier for him to do more of the underpinning structural work early while the jaw is still growing and moldable (Phase 1), and then a Phase 2 'Touch up' adjustment as a teen once the permanent teeth are in ~ vs just waiting and then doing a single, more potentially 'heavy duty' job as a teen like what we remember in our day.

He set his pricing structure up accordingly to essentially incentivize you to go w/ the 2-stage approach, as it was roughly 2/3 the up-front cost and then you got a credit against the full-monty pricing on the next round; his explanation was that the longer you wait (like especially into adulthood) the more your teeth will 'remember' their old alignment and typically recede a bit post-treatment back towards where they were pre-treatment ~ so they'd need to try and compensate for this effect by anticipating how much to over-correct to allow for them to settle back into hopefully ideal alignment. So, that's both more work and tended to produce outcomes with less certainty/consistency (which of course also makes him look worse at his job); hence trying to make it closer to cost-neutral to look at it more like buying into a long-term club membership vs a contained procedure (plus I guess it helps him keep your whole family on the hook as a recurring customer so it's good for business that way as well).

We're happy enough w/ how it all turned out we've since recommended him to some other friends w/ younger kids, even though his staff portrait wall of the doc surrounded by a clutch of middle-aged women all sporting the same poofy blonde hairdo looked awful creepy (Mormon mom thing maybe? Dunno); he did finally hire a couple of younger brunettes by the time our youngest was done w/ the program tho, so I guess that counts as diversity...