This monograph provides an overview of federal laws relevant to the provision of educational services to preschool children with disabilities (as well as additional laws pertaining to children who are homeless) and examines implementation of these laws in New York City. It begins with an overview of federal legislation including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Chapter 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Head Start Act, and the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. The paper also reviews barriers confronting New York City preschoolers with disabilities. Barriers to timely and appropriate identification, evaluation, and placement include failure to solicit parental input, restricted locations of approved evaluation sites, a shortage of bilingual evaluators, inadequate program numbers, and placement of children in segregated programs. Finally, the paper considers barriers confronting preschoolers with disabling conditions who are also homeless. These include inadequate efforts to place homeless preschoolers into available programs, inconsistent application and selection procedures which ignore the transiency associated with homelessness, and failure to identify homeless preschoolers with disabilities due to ineffective or nonexistent outreach. (Contains 36 references.) (DB)