A study examined the status of agricultural supervised occupational experience programs (SOEP) in the state of New York and also the attitudes of agricultural teachers and their building administrators toward SOEP. Two separate survey instruments were used to gather data for the study--one survey was mailed to 333 secondary vocational agriculture teachers and a second survey was mailed to 210 administrators of the individual schools in which these teachers taught. Of those originally contacted, 202 instructors and 131 administrators completed and returned questionnaires. It was found that school administrators are supportive of SOEP although they are less supportive of practices calling for an outlay of expenditures. Although agriculture teachers perceived SOEP as important, they were less supportive of practices dealing with summarizing SOEP data and filing annual reports. A majority of the teachers surveyed lacked the experience of having conducted SOEP as part of their high school education and thus had to rely on pre- or inservice education and other experiences to provide them with the competencies needed to guide their students through SOEP. More than one-third of the teachers surveyed have not received any SOEP-related instruction for college credit. To improve the delivery of SOEP in the state of New York, the following are needed: more inservice education dealing with SOEP, development of written policies and guidelines for SOEP, implementation of standardized recordkeeping procedures for SOEP, and design of an evaluation procedure to monitor trends in SOEP in the State. (MN)