Employment of Related Service Personnel in Preschool Programs: A Survey of General Early Educators

This report describes a mail survey of general early childhood educators to determine the extent to which representatives from various disciplines, commonly found on early childhood education teams, are employed by general early education programs. Randomly selected respondents were from four types of programs: Head Start, public school prekindergarten, public school kindergarten, and community preschool/child care. Of the 893 mailed questionnaires, 483 (54.1%) were returned and coded. Respondents indicated that programs that enrolled at least one child with disabilities tended to employ higher percentages of personnel in related service disciplines than did programs with no children with disabilities. Among other results, surveys indicated that relatively few programs reported having sufficient related service personnel to form basic team constellations.