Background. Based on the regulation of the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia No. 17 the year 2009, the Government assigned all learners who have special needs can participate in the same learning environment with other learners generally. The inclusive education program was implemented from preschool to college. The inclusive education program from an early age can provide a positive impact for children by enhancing empathy, improving the social participation through the interaction between children with special needs and children who are not having a special needs which is commonly referred to as regular children, helping children with special needs for self helping and encouraging peer acceptance of children with special needs.

Parents’involvement in the implementation of inclusive early childhood education is very important, especially for collaboration among family, school, and experts in supporting the qualified inclusive education. Children attitude closely resembles parents’ attitude towards children with special need compared to children aged 11 and 12 years old. Based on the ecological systems theory, the ecology of the inclusive preschool includes not only interaction between teachers, students and parents with children with special needs, but also includes the influence of interaction between parents and regular children towards the interaction between regular children and children with special needs at school. Parents have an important role in directing the behavior of children where the parents' attitude can affect child development, one of them is child's ability to socialize and build a friendship.

Attitude consists of three components are cognition, affection, and behavior. Cognition is the opinions or things that are trusted or not trusted towards objects, where people manage the information about an object. Affection is the emotional response of either like or dislike against objects that are evaluative while behavior is the tendency on responding to an object. Based on the expectancy-value model, the attitude formation is influenced by strength belief that integrated with available information and the objective evaluation which predict high low favorable or unfavorable the attitude. Some factors influence parents’ attitude towards children with special needs are the number of children, marital status, direct experience to children with special needs, employment status and parent education level, the types and levels of special needs. Parents’ attitude towards children with special needs increases positively when they are given information about their children's services get, not just about things that the child will study. Not all schools provide sufficient information related to the inclusive education program at schools. Whereas, knowledge about children with special needs is required to reduce misconceptions about the inclusive education in early childhood.

Methods. This research aims to find out parents’ attitude towards children with special needs based on the availability of information about inclusive education program in inclusive preschool. There are 250 parents of preK students from inclusive preschool in Depok, each consisting of 125 respondents from schools that provide information inclusive education programs and schools which do not. The availability and unavailability of information about inclusive education program were collected from the school principal each inclusive preschools. This research used the accidental sampling and descriptive research design that uses a Likert-type scale survey to describe the comparison of parents’ attitude towards children with special needs based on the availability of information about inclusive education program at inclusive preschool. This research used PATCH (Parent Attitude Towards Child with Handicapped) to measure the parents’ attitude towards children with special needs. According to previous research which was held by Aini in 2018, PATCH-Bahasa version was tested on 310 parents of regular students in inclusive primary schools with reliability 0.917. The PATCH consists of three aspects namely affection, cognition and psychomotor. Each aspect is composed of 10 items with a number of negative and positive items are balanced. The score on this measuring instrument using a Likert-type scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). The collected data will be analyzed quantitatively by using independent sample t-test.

Results. The collected data is still on going.

Conclusion. This research is still in progress.

Added-Values. The results of this study are expected to provide information whether inclusive education program is needed by parents of regular children to support the implementation of inclusive education in preschool.

Keywords: parent, attitude, student with special need, inclusive preschool.

Word count : 699 words.