Okul yöneticilerinin engelli çocukların okullarda dahil edilmesine yönelik tutumları(Sakarya ilindeki ilköğretim ve ortaöğretim okullar örneği, Türkiye)

All children have the right to education. Inclusive education ensures the participation of all students in schooling. It involves restructuring the cultures, policies and practices in schools so that they can respond to the diversity by acknowledges and respects the differences of the children at school. For decades, many educational reforms have been introduced to the education system in Turkey in order to identify various unsatisfactory aspects in the educational field. This reform was in relation to the initiative of inclusive education with the aim of integrating children with disabilities in schools, particularly in regular/general schools. Generally, the idea of inclusive education has been perceived as an opportunity to bring about changes in the structure of the contemporary educational system, in a way that increases the variety of educational and pedagogical experience among the educators in schools. Moreover, school administrators have been considered as the most significant role players among the various education professionals in the successful implementation of these educational reforms, particularly inclusive education program in their school environment. Therefore, it is important to understand the attitudes of the school administrators towards inclusive education. The foundation of this study is to find out the attitudes of the public elementary and middle school administrators and the possible factors that influencing their attitudes towards inclusion of children with disabilities in general schools. This research is a descriptive study using survey methodology. The research was conducted using "Principals' Attitudes Towards Inclusive Education (PATIE) scale" that entitled to collect data from 232 school administrators in Sakarya province. The collected data were analysed using different analytical tools such as t-test, and MANOVA and ANOVA. The results of the study showed the overall attitudes of the school administrators towards inclusion of children with disabilities at schools was significantly positive, though there some concerns that have been raised among the school administrators about the effective implementations of inclusive education in general schools. Moreover, based on the results, the attitudes of school administrators in Sakarya were depended on the several independent variables such as school type, training related to special education, level of disabilities, job position and teaching experience in general schools. In other words, these variables played significant roles in the influencing school administrators' attitudes towards the inclusion of children with disabilities in schools. However, some of the independent variables such as; age, gender, teaching experience in special education schools, the number of disabled students, administrative experiences, personal experience with individuals with disabilities and the number of students enrolled in school were not found statistically significant and did not predict favourable attitudes among the school administrators towards the inclusion of children with disabilities in schools. The majority of the participants confirmed that their teaching experiences and training related to special education and inclusive practices was quite limited, though they have expressed their experiences of educating or supervising regular schools with children with disabilities. Nevertheless, school administrators reported to support more inclusive education for the children with mild disabilities, and it has been found that those who undertaken training related to the special education tended to have more favourable attitudes towards inclusive education; in addition, they believe that disabled children and non-disabled children may benefit academically and socially from studying together in general/regular schools. Since the majority of the demonstrated limited trainings on special education, this study emphasizes on the implementation of ongoing training development for teachers and school administrators. Developing training in special education is a way of overcoming teacher and school administrators' expressed the lack of confidence while giving emphasis to the importance of treating and monitoring each child positively, and inventing plans which will enable children to make progress in relation to their starting level of skills, knowledge and personal attributes. The government should make sure that all necessary resources supporting education for children with disabilities should be provided to the schools that committed to implementing inclusive education. Keywords: Attitude, Inclusive Education, General Schools, Public School Administrators, Children with Disabilities.