Background. Inclusive education is an education system that provides the requirement that all children with special needs are given services at the nearby school in a regular classroom with their peers. Inclusive education aims to fulfill the right of all children to get the education and to optimize the potential of the children. In Indonesia, the implementation of inclusive education in schools still encounter many obstacles. This is due to the rejection of schools, teachers, or parents who do not have special needs children (furthermore referred as regular students) thus affecting the educational process of children with special needs.

One of the most influential parties in implementing inclusive education is parents. The influence arises from the views, attitudes, and beliefs that parents have toward inclusive education. There are three important factors that can influence the practice of inclusive education including attitudes, resources (access to expert and teachers skills), as well as the applicable curriculum. The parental concerns about the presence of student with special needs in the classroom will disrupt the learning process as well as physical and verbal violence perpetrated by peers, social isolation, and diminish or even not received the education services and the quality of attention that is expected become a constraint in the implementation of inclusive education programs in society. Those will have an impact on the difficulty of the student with special needs to gain equal access to education with other regular students.

Attitude is an idea contains emotions and influences one’s actions in a social situation. Attitude refers to individual’s evaluation of a psychological object that is captured in the dimensions of like-dislike, good-bad, and pleasant-unpleasant attribute. Parental attitudes affect the development of children’s attitude through daily conversations, answering questions asked by the child, or through behaviors which are shown by the parents when interacting with children with special needs. Attitudes that children have will affect the acceptance of the child to peers with special needs. This research aims to see the differences between parental attitudes of regular students toward students with special needs in the inclusive and non-inclusive kindergarten. The hypothesis of this study is that parents who send their children to inclusive education will have more positive attitude toward the student with special needs than parents who send their children to non-inclusive kindergarten.

Methods. There are 250 parents who participate in this study involved 125 parents of a regular student on each first level and second level inclusive and non-inclusive kindergarten in Depok and Jakarta. The measuring of parental attitudes are used the Parent Attitude toward Children with Handicapped (PATCH) questionnaire which consists of 30 items with Likert type scale, starting from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). The reliability of PATCH-Bahasa version is 0,917 and was tested on 310 parents of regular students in inclusive primary school. The items of PATCH aim to explore how the parent’s attitude of regular students toward the student with special needs are seen from 3 dimensions: affective, cognitive, and behavioral. This study is descriptive which aims to provide a comparison of parental attitudes towards students with special needs in inclusive and non-inclusive kindergarten based on demographic data including gender, parental education level, experience interacting with individuals with disabilities and disability type, and the distance between home and school. The collected data will be analyzed quantitatively by using independent measure t-test

Results. The data collection process is still ongoing.

Conclusion. This research is still ongoing.

Added-Values. The results of this study are expected to provide information about parental attitudes of preschool children toward student with special needs based on demographic data, such as gender, parental education level, experience interacting with individuals with disabilities and disability type, and also the distance between home and school. The information obtained from this research is expected to support the implementation of inclusive education in Indonesia, especially at the preschool level.

Keywords: parents, attitude, student with special needs, inclusive preschool.

Word count: 637 words.