An Administrator's Guide to Preschool Inclusion (UNC-FPG; by Ruth Ashworth Wolery, Samuel L. Odom)

Description:

For many administrators and educators working in early childhood programs, inclusion is filled with complex and puzzling issues. Administrators hold a powerful role in creating and maintaining inclusive classrooms for young children. Over the past 5 years, we have talked with many administrators who set program policy. These admininstrators exert key influences over whether or not inclusive classrooms exist and how successful the programs are for children, teachers, and families. The purpose of this guide is to address some of the issues raised by the administrators of these inclusive settings. We discuss the barriers and roadblocks these administrators encountered as they set up inclusive programs and then worked to keep them going successfully. We present practical strategies that emerged from our work and we also draw upon the larger literature and work of others. In places, we introduce some of the people who, through their stories and experiences, illustrate how to make high quality early childhood inclusion a reality.