Strategies for Including Children with Special Needs in Early Childhood Settings

Ruth E. Cook, Ph. D., is a Professor Emeritus of Special Education at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. She is also a licensed Educational Psychologist and School Psychologist. Dr. Cook was formerly the director of two inclusive campus preschool programs; one at Mount Saint Mary's College in Los Angeles and the other at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Currently, she is an instructor in the EPIC (Education Preparation for Inclusive Classrooms) program at the Santa Clara County Office of Education in California, which offers credentials in Early Childhood Special Education and Moderate Severe Disabilities.Anne Marie Richardson- Gibbs, M.A., is an inclusion specialist working with preschoolers, transitional kindergarteners, and kindergarteners with special needs enrolled in typical early childhood programs and elementary schools in El Monte, California. She was a program specialist for the California Department of Education SEEDS Project, providing technical assistance to early intervention and preschool programs throughout the state. She was also the program director of Centro de Niños y Padres, an early intervention program at California State University, Los Angeles, for eight years. During this time, she pioneered a consultant position providing inclusion support for young children with disabilities in inclusive settings.Laurie Nielsen, M.A., is an adjunct faculty of Child Development at Mission College. She was the former Inclusion Training Specialist for Santa Clara County Office of Education in California, providing inclusion coaching and professional development trainings to school districts, preschools, and community agencies. She is an Early Childhood Special Educator and a person living with a disability. (Assistive technology, in the form of a voice-recognition system, was used by the author as an alternative form of writing for many of the updates in this edition.)