Head Start Children Finishing First Grade: Preliminary Data on School Identification of Children at Risk for Special Education.

* Children with disabilities who are identified as eligible for special education comprise just over 13% of the children in Head Start programs (O'Brien, 1993; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1992). Past research has found that children with Head Start or similar preschool experience require significantly fewer special education placements on follow-up than children without such experience (Lazar, Darlington, Murray, Royce, & Snipper, 1982; Zigler & Muenchow, 1992). The identification of children with disabilities in the schools has changed substantially, however, since the original studies evaluating Head Start, especially in the largest and most controversial special education categories such as mental retardation (MR), learning disabilities (LD), speech or language impairments (SL), and emotional disturbance (ED) (U.S. Department of Education, 1995). It is not clear whether children with MR who make the transition from Head Start might be identified in numbers greater than expected, are identified in other categories of special education for mild problems such as LD, or tend not to be identified in the elementary grades at all (MacMillan, Siperstein, & Gresham, 1996). Although LD is the largest category of special education at 5.3 % of school enrollment (U.S. Department of Education, 1995), identification of children with LD in the preschool or early grades has been problematic (Hurford, 1994; Keogh & Weisner, 1993). Since formal reading or mathematics skills typically are not taught until kindergarten or even first grade, identification of LD is relatively rare prior to the middle elementary grades. Even in children who potentially have LD, the discrepancy between intelligence and achievement, which is the key diagnostic indicator for LD, usually takes time to develop (Kavale & Forness, 1995). This may be one reason why the category of speech or language impairment is the largest single disability category identified for special education during Head Start, when children are 3 to 4 years old (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1992). It is not clear at what point in the transition from preschool to the elementary grades this shift in identification from SL to LD takes place (Snyder, Bailey, & Auer,1994). Children with emotional disturbance comprise very few of the children identified as having disabilities either in Head Start or in the early grades (Bowe, 1995). This category is known in federal special education law as serious emotional disturbance, and it continues to include all children with significant emotional or behavioral disorders. Even during the school years, children identified in this category represent only 0.9% of school enrollment (U.S. Department of Education, 1995), which is well below the prevalence of childhood emotional or behavioral disorders found in epidemiologic studies (Brandenburg, Friedman, & Silver, 1990; Friedman, Katz-Leavy, Manderscheid, & Sondheimer,1996). The definition and criteria for ED in Head Start appear to be much less restrictive than those used for emotional or behavioral disorders under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the school years (Forness & Kavale, 1997). However, this category seems to have received much less attention in Head Start programs than the other three disability categories (Forness & Finn, 1993; Knitzer, 1996). The reasons for this relative lack of interest have not been documented, but it is possible that the primary focus of Head Start on cognitive and academic readiness has served to relegate mental health to a less substantial position of concern and may even have led teachers or clinicians to focus only on the academic and linguistic problems that underlie emotional or behavioral disorders. When systematic attention is paid to screening for emotional or behavioral disorders in Head Start or other related preschool populations, the rate of identification tends to be substantially higher than that produced by current practice (Feil & Becker, 1993; Sinclair, Del Homme, & Gonzalez, 1993; Stallard, 1993). …