Are We Ready for PL 99-457?

Public Law 99-457 has renewed interest in providing preschool education for hearing-impaired children. It is not clear, however, whether we're ready for this mandate to expand services to an ever-younger population and its families.

This study presents a "snapshot" of the trends in preschool programs and of the availability of programming to students 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 questionnaires. The returned surveys provided a snapshot of the instructional approaches used in many preschool programs and indicated that there may still be some problems in the availability of preschool programming and in the ability of programs to uniformly provide the sorts of quality comprehensive services mandated by the law.