ARE WE READY FOR PL 99-457

Public Law 99-457 has renewed interest in providing preschool educatio n for hearing-impaired children. It is not clear, however, whether we' re ready for this mandate to expand services to an ever-younger popula tion and its families. This study presents a "snapshot" of the trends in preschool programs and of the availability of programming to studen ts in various parts of the country. We obtained lists of programs from a sample of state level special education offices, and then sent the programs detailed questionnaire. The returned surveys provided a snaps hot of the instructional approaches used in many preschool programs an d indicated that there may still be some problems in the availability of preschool programming and in the ability of programs to uniformly p rovide the sorts of quality comprehensive services mandated by the law .