Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Employer Best Practices: Recruitment and Hiring of People with Disabilities conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode, but we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions on how to participate will be given at that time. If anyone requires assistance during todays call please press star then zero on your touch-tone phone. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today''s conference, Mr. Peter Berg. Mr. Berg, you may begin.
All right. Thank you very much and welcome everyone to the ADA Audio Conference, a monthly Audio Conference series which is a collaboration of the national network of 10 regional ADA Centers also known as Disabilities and Business Technical Assistance Centers, DBTAC. You may reach the ADA Center that serves your state by calling 800-949-4232 and as always you can get information about upcoming audio conference sessions as well as access to archives of past sessions by visiting the Audio Conference web page at www.ada-audio.org. The audio archives as well as a text transcript of today''s session will be available in 10 to 14 business days following today''s session. The regional ADA Centers are sponsored, funded through the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research which is a division of the U.S. Department of Education. Today we have an excellent session for you, titled Employer Best Practices: Recruitment and Hiring of Individuals with Disabilities. And this session is going to highlight the practices of the Cincinnati Children''s Hospital as well as the Walgreen''s Corporation. We have two speakers for you today, and the way that we are going to present it is we will have our speakers give their presentations and following the second presentation, we will then open it up to you, the participants, to ask questions. Our first speaker today will be Jennifer Linnabary who is with the Cincinnati Children''s Hospital. Jennifer began her career as a Job Developer with the Hamilton County Board of Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities. She joined the hospital as the Employment Coordinator with Project Search. Jennifer spent extensive time working with hospital managers and supervisors on adapting the healthcare environment for individuals with disabilities. Jennifer has presented to local and national healthcare audiences as well as supported work force on the topic of employing individuals with disabilities. Our second speaker is Deb Russell with the Walgreens Corporation. Deb joined the Walgreens Corporation in 2006 to manage the Career Outreach Department. The focus and goal of that department is employing, having employees in their distribution centers that will be opened, employ one-third, one-third of the workforce will be employees with disabilities. Deb will talk about that. Deb has worked as a Job Developer, Director of a Job Development Program and also a Manager of a Systems Change Project at the state level. Deb has also presented to national audiences on the projects of Walgreen''s and employing individuals with disabilities. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Jennifer.
Thank you. And I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present today. I always love to brag, I mean talk about our program here at the Cincinnati Childrens. And I have to say this venue will be a little bit strange for me, because I would like to read the faces of those that I am presenting to, and know whether the message is getting across or not. So it will be interesting to see at the end of this, how many people I have lost. So, let me start out and give you an overview of what Project Search is and this statement that I am going to read can actually be found on our web site which would be at CincinnatiChildrens.org/ps. And it says that Project Search provides employment and education opportunities for individuals with significant disabilities. The program is dedicated to work-force development that benefits the individual, community and workplace. Project Search has been around for 12 years now. We are actually entering the 12th year in June. We are known around the world and actually our director Erin Riley, who was supposed to be on the presentation, is in London presenting to their healthcare system, and she is the keynote speaker there. They have actually started a program in one of their boroughs as they call it, over in London, England. So our program not only is replicated around the world, but also here in our own country. We have several sites that are up and running. There are some that are in different stages of development. So, we are looking at states like Florida, Indiana, Georgia. I just had a tour last week that came from Idaho. So people have really taken an interest in our program. The program simply began by a call from the business and that was a call from Erin Riley, who was at that time the Director of the Emergency Department. She reached out and called an agency and a school and said, you know, Please, I need your help in filling a position here in the Emergency Department. From that point the program has taken off. Our program is very unique in that it is a collaboration. It is not just the hospital reaching out and looking at hiring folks with disabilities. It is not just an agency coming into the program and asking to place a person or two. So, as I go through, I will explain how that collaboration works. And then again, at the end of all of our presentations, I can take your questions. There are two main components of our program that make it unique. The first one is a High School Transition Program, and that is the education piece that I mentioned in our mission statement there. The second is the Adult Employment Program. For a High School Transition Program, what we are looking at is bringing a high school class here on site at the hospital. So for their final year of school, which in Ohio can be up until the age of 21, actually the year you turn 22 is the year that you exit school, we bring those students right into the business. They do not go to their home school but they come here and immersed into a business locale. When we look for students, what we are looking for is that the student has to be at least the age of 18 because that is how old you have to be to be hired into a hospital. They have to have a desire to work in a healthcare setting. They have to be willing and able to access independent transportation. They have to have basic communication skills, so we are looking at people that are verbal, people that use sign language, communication devices, spelling boards, whatever their way of independently communicating. They need to have the appropriate social grooming and hygiene skills, independent toilet training and feeding skills. They have to be able to pass a drug screen and a felony check. Because again, that is a criteria of the hospital. What we are looking for is at the end of the program that these people are employed, hopefully in this host business, but if not in another similar business. And they also have to be updated on their immunizations. For me, the number one thing I look at in a student who wants to join our program is someone who has that desire to really want to work because I am looking at spending nine months with a person. And at the outset of that or at the final nine months, I want that person to be employed. I do not want to have to go through nine months and the person said, Nah, I wanted this for fun. I want to go to a workshop. So, again, that real willingness and drive to want to work. The way our program works in the way of funding is something that we like to call graded funding where everyone brings their resources together. So for example, the host business, which in this case is Cincinnati Childrens Hospital, would provide us with a business liaison. That person is not employed by Project Search but is somebody who can give us maybe 10% of their time, devote that much time to the program. And it is that person who is going to help us learn the culture of the hospital. They are also going to help us set up the student internship site and help us understand what training is required in a hospital setting. We ask for a room, a designated space for our class so that if there is down time, the students have a place to come back to. We also run our school day so that the first hour of that school day is actually spent in the classroom. We have a state-approved curriculum. And for that first hour, they are going over things such as interviewing skills, developing a resume, how do you give a 2-week notice. What are your phone skills like? As the year goes along we might be looking at budgeting. And you know, once you are employed, how do you manage your money? Then, for the most of the rest of the day, they are out on their internships sites gaining those skills. And then, they are back at the end of the day for kind of a wrap up, and, you know, journaling of what happened during that day. Some of our students may be very good at writing and computers, so they will be journaling on the computer. Others may require assistance in that they may be cutting out things from a magazine to help talk about their day or whatever the topic of the day might be. So that is why it is real important that we have that designated space so that the students always have a place to come back to. We also asked for computer access so that the teacher can report back to her home school of the attendance and any other necessary paperwork that is done. Also, here at Children''s, all of our students do have access to the hospitals e-mail. They are all given e-mail accounts and that way they can check up on what is really going on at the hospital and what are some of the things that other people are being alerted to. So that is what we are asking for from the hospital. When it comes to the school, the school is the one funding the teacher. That comes from a special pull-down grant from our state department, but that funding does come from the school system. And also, the school is responsible, if we have a student that needs a sign language interpreter, or maybe we need to have a rehab technician come in to look at a work site, or we need some extra support, the school is going to help to provide the resources for that. Our state VR agency, I guess other initials I will throw out are RSC and BVR; they provide funding for our job coaches. Currently here we have 3 part-time job coaches that work with our 12 students. And so, the funding for that comes from VR and here we have payment points established so that VR may pay us one payment point when the student starts the program. And then they may pay us again once the student enters that job development phase and again at the end of 90 days the VR is going to give us payment there. So that is how our graded funding works in order to get students into our program. Again, we look at 12 students which is you know, the maximum we feel that we can take here. We really rely on that business liaison to find us those internship sites. And when we are looking at the internships sites, we are looking at sites that would provide skills that would translate out into the community. So some internships sites that have been successful here was that a gentleman worked in our Pathology Department in kind of a runner position. And so it was just part of a job duties that was pulled out of a job, but they realized that this was a position that they have not had for 4 years and they desperately wanted to continue. Our school year is now over. So they asked the question, how do we keep this student? And the answer was pretty simple. You put him into a paid position and then he can stay. The department has just told us today that they are going to do that. They do have a position open and he will be stepping into that starting in a couple of weeks and become a paid Children''s Hospital employee now. Other successful job rotations we had is somebody in a courier service taking mail around, even in some cases delivering blood specimens around. Jobs that have resulted from that have been an official lab courier position where the person is now on a full-time basis delivering lab products as well as blood specimens throughout the hospital. So, again, we try to be very selective with the sites that we have and look at will this lead to employment either here at Children''s, or will it lead to employment in the community? Is there a job that is similar that we can place them in? Our success rate in the 11 years that we have had our high school program is pretty good. We are at an 85% placement rate. Now, not all of that has been at the hospital. There are some years that 100% of the class is hired by the hospital. But there are other years that maybe only 50% of the class is hired by the hospital. This year, I think, I am looking at 3 of the individuals from the class being hired by the hospital. But we will work with that student to secure them a job in the community with those skills that they have learned. So with that combined effort, their success rate is relatively high. Here, in Cincinnati, not only do we have a Project Search program at the Children''s Hospital, we also have probably our next largest program, locally, at our Fifth Third Bank where they are learning data entry skills. They are working in the mail room there. They are doing a lot of different skills there. Fifth Third its first year again was quite enthusiastic and hired probably 90% of the class. This is their third year, so they are looking at hiring, maybe, 3 individuals out of that class. But the neat part about how they run their program is that they have partnered with the other banks in town to find employment for the students that cannot get hired by the host business. So that is another successful program that is being replicated in several other banks across the United States. We also have a program here at Xavier University and that one is probably in its fifth year, where students will work in different sites around campus you know, anything from working in the Dean''s office, to filing, to working in food service. Landscaping is a huge department there that loves to have our students and have actually hired a couple of our students. Then, we do have our high school program in a smaller hospital around the city. And then we also have one in a retirement center, Otterbein Retirement Community, which is a relatively large retirement center. It is one that you could call a small town, because they have their own zip code. So you know, they have opportunities in their post office there, they are actually working with the patients in doing some different types of activities there. So the program is not just a hospital-based program, but it has been viable in a lot of different businesses. The reason why I start out with that one and the reason why when people come through for tours, we kind of stress starting with the High School Program is because in a lot of ways, it is a safe way for the hospital or whatever business to get comfortable in working with folks with disabilities, to realize how valuable of a resource they have here. And also, to realize that they cannot do without that person. And so, as I have shown in a lot of cases, they are going to go above and beyond to create a position for that individual. So, by doing that, you change the culture of the business that you are in, and do it in a safe way you know for the hospital or whatever business to get comfortable with working with folks with disabilities. But, having said that, one of the biggest and strongest parts of our program is our Adult Employment Program. I kind of like to refer to this as a single point of entry. Project Search can also be looked upon as the preferred vendor. Because what traditionally happens, and those of you in the field as job developers would know that this is so true, that if you have a business that you know might be friendly to folks with disabilities, there are a lot of agencies going and knocking on that door and saying you know, Do you have a job? Please work with me. But the hospital does not really understand that there are so many of us out there and often get confused and fed up with the tactics you know that we use to try to get in. And to be honest, I was one of those individuals trying to work from the outside. I actually call it my 9 months of labor that produced nothing. Where I, before I received a call from Erin, I actually was trying every trick I knew to get a gentleman into the hospital to work in food services. You know, we filled out the applications, we stopped by, I even found out that one of my coworkers knew the Human Resource Manager. So you know we just made a cold call one day saying, Hey, I have your buddy here. By the way, will you hire my person? I got nowhere and I think the hospital was just fed up with that. You know they did not have an opening and did not like my persistence with that, I guess. But what we have done now with Project Search is that we really approached it from the business frame of mind that whatever we do has to be business-centered and business-directed. So the preferred vendor model, the single point of entry is how the hospital works with any of their vendors, whether it be a food vendor or someone providing syringes. You know they work with one company that, hopefully, will supply them what they need. So, in our case, if the hospital has identified an opening and we all feel that is appropriate for somebody with a disability, then I will do a job analysis on that position. I will send out the information to our school program and to our adult job developer, who then will bring back candidates for that position. We will do some pre-screening through the means of a rubric and choose the best 2 or 3 candidates to present to the employer. And then the employer has the final say over who is hired. So, that is one of the ways that we work with the hospital. But currently, we have 60 adults that are employed here at Children''s. Probably, half of those if not a few more of those came through our High School Transition Program. So these are the students that were in here, they were immersed into the business and the business said, I dont want to lose them. I want to keep them. The other probably about 28 came through as the adults through that single point of entry that I was just describing. When we are looking at the adults we want to bring in here, we look at a lot of the same criteria we did for the students. Again, they have to be about 18 years to 21 years or 18 years or older. Again because, that is how old you have to be to work in a hospital. They have to possess some of the necessary skills to perform that essential function of the job. And that can be including the modifications that we might put in to place. And then they have to be willing to work the hours that the employer needs. We have people that are employed 24/7. So you know, third shift, I have a couple of people that work that. Second shift, you know so again, the person just cannot say, I want a little 9 to 2 job, because in a hospital setting, that is not always feasible. The departments that we have adults working in could include the dental clinic, sterilization, pathology, food service, materials management, and the list goes on and on. Our average hourly rate, and we look again at the prevailing rate for that department is $10.40 an hour. The average years of employment are 6 and the half years. So, when our individuals start working, they stay. Again, for the funding, to make this work, we look at that graded funding once again. From the hospital we are looking at the business liaison again to help us identify those jobs as they come open. We are also looking at a desk space for the follow along individual and computer access so that they can keep on top of what is happening at the hospital. The agency, which here at Project Search at Children''s, that provides the follow along service, is also our school. It is the Great Oaks Institute of Technology. We have an adult component where we provide follow along services in the community to adults that are eligible for MRDD funding. So we can provide that service to the adults here. So, Great Oaks is the one who employs me but the funding for my position actually comes from our County Board of Mental Retardation. Our county has no longer provides direct service but they contract out for that. So Great Oaks was the one who got the contract and that is how I am able to be housed here. Now of the 60 folks that I have here employed at Children''s, only 33 of those are eligible for MRDD services. But because I am here, I can provide that service to everybody. You know, often times, our individuals are in a department working together you know. So it does not make any sense for me to say, Oh, you are not MRDD eligible, I am not dealing with your issues. You know I can because I am here and on site, I can deal with those large numbers and do that very efficiently. Now I did not start out full-time here. Because when we first started, I think our next big push after we started with the young lady in the emergency department was we had 13 individuals hired as couriers. When they were hired into that role then I got to spend you know about a quarter of my time here. And then as the numbers started to grow, I could spend more and more of my time here. So it is kind of an economy of scale you know. It really it does not serve the county well or Great Oaks well to have me here full-time if I do not have the numbers to support that. So my time here kind of grew as the employees, as we build upon that. Funding is also provided through VR or RSC will provide funding to do retraining, if necessary. So they are willing to reopen a case if we have a job save situation or if we have somebody who moves into a new position and we need to do the training from the very get-go on that person. So they have, kind of, are willing to fund for that. The new funding that we are going to look into really heavily here and Deb and I were just singing the praises before you guys came on that the new Ticket to Work regulations came out today. And those rules will become effective July 21st. If you have not looked at those, you might want to seriously consider them, the new Ticket to Work regulations. Because they are going to be able to provide additional funding for that long-term follow along funding that has never been available before, funding that will help me help those folks that may not be MRDD eligible. And it gives us that extra resource to continue that level of funding that we need to keep our folks employed here. Because the cornerstone of the program here and in any of the other locations that we have is the fact that we have on-site staff. So the Hospital recognizes me, they see me on a daily basis. I can quickly do any modifications or adaptations to a job that I need to. I can address problems as they occur. Oftentimes, I will see problems that are starting to form before they actually become huge problems there. So we kind of avoid that old fine, fine, fired scenario that I often saw in the community of where you are doing a follow along every week or every other week and one manager tells you they are fine, the next week a different manager tells you they are fine and the third week you go back and find out they have been fired because of some issue. Here, for the most part, we can be on top of those problems and address them as they occur. So that is just an overview as to what Project Search is and hopefully, you can see how we are different than the traditional models that are out there. Again, we are replicated throughout the United States. We would be more than happy to speak to any other business or organization about how to start our program. But with that, I am going to turn it over to Deb for her portion of this.
Thank you, Jennifer. As I was introduced, I work for the Walgreens Company, I have been with the company for just under 2 years helping to manage Walgreen''s distribution efforts to employ more people with disabilities. And I wanted to make it clear that what I will be talking about today is the distribution division''s efforts to employ more people with disabilities. I am not really prepared today to discuss the retail side. A lot of it is corporate-wide, the changes that we have made. So starting back about 6 years ago, our Senior Vice President of Distribution, Randy Lewis, who has a son with autism started really thinking about the lack of opportunities for jobs for people with disabilities, especially people with autism when they exit school. And at the same time Walgreens was planning on making a capital investment and creating new technology for the distribution division. So it was an ideal opportunity to take the two and put them together. And so the task for the engineers that were hired to create this new technology was to, while creating technology, processes, workstations, anything related to being able to move products faster through our distribution centers, the idea was to try to create opportunities for people with disabilities, and especially people with cognitive disabilities and people with autism. So through the process of creating this new technology, the engineers looked at a lot of different aspects of our jobs and our workstations and our processes to determine the most ideal ways to do that. And the culmination of those efforts was Anderson, South Carolina, where we built our first distribution center of this technology. The Anderson, South Carolina building opened in January of 2007 with the goal that one third of the workforce there would be people with disabilities. And I am happy to say that we have exceeded that, as this building continues to ramp up in operations we usually estimate 2 to 2 and a half years for a building going from opening to full operations. As we get closer to full operations which will be 800 employees, we expect to continue to exceed the goal of one-third of the employees being employees with disabilities. And we have heard of employees with disabilities here. There are employees who have disclosed to us that they have a disability. They are provided that opportunity here in this building, all new employees are, because the building has such a specific purpose, we ask our employees if they so choose, to let us know if they have a disability. They are also given the opportunity to tell us what kind of disability they have if they so choose. It is made very clear that the reason we ask for that information is simply so we can report on it as we are discussing our efforts to employ more people with disabilities. So we started with the idea that we were going to be employing people in these new workstations and these new jobs and employing people with disabilities in those jobs. And the company did a pretty smart thing, I think, they reached out to the agencies that serve people with disabilities in the Anderson, South Carolina area looking for assistance on how to locate these candidates, how to do pre-hire training for them, how to support them once they are in the job, also using the partnerships with these agencies to help tweak some of the workstation design and some of the technology changes. These agencies that are in partnership with Walgreens in Anderson, South Carolina have been invaluable to us for our success in being able to employ people with disabilities and people with pretty significant disabilities who traditionally, are not offered employment opportunities in the distribution field. As we went through this exercise of opening this building and having this new work force and looking at issues, management, we played a lot of games that I call what if games. Well, what if this situation happens? And what if that situation happens? And we were very fortunate to have a leader who said, You know what, we will cross that bridge when we get to it. I do not want to say that Walgreens went blindly into this, but we did not let all of our what ifs hold us back from achieving the goal of opening the building on time, meeting our business needs, and at the same time being able to offer these opportunities. As we went through opening the building and getting it established, we had the opportunity to have a grand opening celebration where we invited many of our vendors to the building. And the whole point of the grand opening was to show off the workforce, not to show off the technology. And that was a great experience having other companies being able to view people with disabilities and people with obvious disabilities working productively side-by-side with everybody else in the workforce. Although we had originally thought that there were going to be three specific positions that our partners would help train individuals for prior to being hired, we quickly learned that people with disabilities, of course, can work in any and all jobs that we have in this building. That knowledge was also shared with the employers who came to see us at our grand opening. At our grand opening we handed out a little card that has our how-tos and lessons learned. And I want to go over those because we realized that what we have learned through this experience of trying to become a better employer of people with disabilities is applicable everywhere. And as the rest of our distribution centers have determined that they, too, want to be able to employ more people with disabilities, they follow these same how-tos and lessons learned as have some of our stores who have decided to embark on this endeavor, et cetera. So I do not think these are necessarily Walgreens-specific, but they are things that we figured out along the way. In our first how-to is that we advise everyone to get a partner to provide the workforce. This is incredibly important, as I said earlier. We would not have been anywhere near the level of success that we had if we did not have the partners to help us with the pre-hire training, some of the pre-screening, with helping us determine how to make sure that our workplace was accessible and that our environment was welcoming to individuals that they served. And our partners also helped provide a lot of disability expertise for us that we have needed. As things have come up through the last year and a half, they have been there all along to assist us in making decisions, looking at policies and continuing to supply us with a good supply of workforce. We are about halfway to our 800 employees goal. Our second how-to is to start with a rock star employee. And this is kind of a controversial term so we will probably change that how-to when we reprint these cards. But the idea is that, in most of our existing buildings, not in Anderson but in the rest of our buildings, we have an established work force that has had limited experience with people with disabilities, and definitely limited experience with people with disabilities being successfully employed as their peers. And so, we have encouraged our buildings as they develop these partnerships if the agencies and those partnerships can identify a candidate who can also serve the role of ambassador for people with disabilities to the work force that has limited experience with people with disabilities, we encourage them to hire that person first. So if you have the choice between a person with a disability who can do the job and has an outgoing personality, really can be very engaging with other individuals in the work force versus a person with a disability who can do the job but does not necessary have that kind of outgoing personality, you hire the person with the outgoing personality first then you hire the other person. So it is not an either/or, it is just that if you have the opportunity to work with somebody who really can bridge that gap, that is really helpful in co-worker education. We also liken that to Jackie Robinson being the first individual to cross the color barrier into baseball. He was someone with a very engaging personality to help make individuals more at ease with something that was different to them. Our third how-to is to hold your ground on standards. Our part of the company is very numbers driven. We need to get so many trucks out with so much product on it at every hour. And everything that we do is driven by making sure that we get product to the store in the schedule that it had been set. And we have very high productivity goals in this building and the rest of our buildings as well as accuracy rates. We have standards for safety, attendance, timeliness and teamwork. And those are all really important standards for us to be successful in what we are doing, and that is getting the product to the stores. So we were not willing to give on any of those standards when hiring people with disabilities. And we were pleasantly, not surprised, but we pleasantly figured out as we opened the building that people with disabilities could meet our standards. We didnt need to lower any standards for people with disabilities to be successful in our workplace. There are individual accommodations of course that are made, but we did not need to lower any of our standards. And that is some things that some employers have asked us as we go around the country talking about this. And I just want to reiterate again, we do not give on those standards. People need to be able to do the job and do the job well. Our fourth how-to is to face co-workers fears with education. As I stated earlier, we know that most of our existing work force does not have experience with co-workers being people with disabilities or successful co-workers being people with disabilities. And without that experience this can be very new and daunting and can cause fear. And we do not want our co-workers to be afraid of their co-workers as more individuals with disabilities come on board. And so we have tried very hard to create opportunities, mostly, again, with our partners where these kind of fears can be addressed through disability etiquette training, through opportunities to meet people with disabilities who are successfully employed, opportunity to experience assistive technology and play around with that a little bit, opportunity just to talk with individuals on a panel who have disabilities in an open forum where they can become more accustomed to something that is very different for them. Our lessons learned are that a company does not need an expert on disability issues to do this. They do need somebody who is going to monitor the partnerships and really kind of steer this, but you dont need a disability expert in your ranks to be able to do this. As long as you got the partnerships and somebody internally driving it, the company will be very successful at doing this. We learned very quickly doing this that our managers need permission to do the right thing, meaning that some of our managers were afraid of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. And that kind of paralyzed them into doing nothing. We do not want that fear to be in the way of individuals taking risks and trying new things. Most of the pleasant surprises we have had is when managers have had very high expectations for their candidates with disability and those individuals have met those expectations. But without the permission to take those kinds of risks, I think our managers would be much less likely to challenge individuals and to adopt these kinds of lofty goals that we have got. So we make it very clear to our managers that there isnt any, you arent going to be fired, automatically, if you say something wrong. But the idea is if you do make a mistake, that you learn from it, you apologize, and you move forward and apply those lessons in the future. Our third lesson that we have learned is that obstacles will surface unexpectedly and will be addressed as needed. We sat around for about a week playing what if games. What if we get a reasonable accommodation for an individual and then everyone else in the department asks for that? Or what if somebody wanders off the property? And what we realized very quickly was that we just couldnt sit around waiting for the what ifs to all be listed and every contingency plan to be formed. It just wasnt going to be a realistic use of our time. A lot of the things that we did have our contingency plans created for some what ifs, those what ifs never came true, and it was wasted effort. I am glad we realize that we should just stop that exercise and just move forward. If Walgreens had waited to be 100% ready to do this, we would still be waiting. There is not any way to say that you got every single base covered. You just need to go in there with a commitment and faith that this is going to happen and that you will figure it out as you go. One of our lesson learned is that no good deed goes unpunished. We have been criticized harshly by the disability community for different aspects of what we have done in employing people with disabilities. And this will not detract us from continuing on this path. We are very plain in saying we are not experts in employing people with disabilities. We are experts in what our experience has already been. And we are learning every day how to do things a little bit differently, we are constantly tweaking our plans and continuing to try to move forward, although sometimes it means we are moving to the left or sometimes it means we are moving to the right, but we do get a lot of criticism on how we have done this. And some of that criticism is very helpful in having us re-evaluate what we are doing and looking at things a little differently to ensure that we are going in the direction we want to go in. But our final lesson we have learned and our Senior Vice President, Randy Lewis, continues to say this all the time, this is the best thing that Walgreens has ever done, to be able to open this untapped labor force and see the changes that has created for our work force here in Anderson and in other distribution centers as they have continued their efforts to reach out to candidates with disabilities, it has become a morale booster. We have done some quick data analysis on some very limited data to show that people with disabilities dont have any higher turnover, dont have any higher absentee rates, they dont have any higher tardiness. Their production levels are just about the same. Accuracy levels are just about the same. We see high producers across our employees who disclosed disabilities and we see some lower producers. And across the rest of our work force we see some high producers and some lower producers. So what we are seeing is that our employees with disabilities are just reflective of the rest of our workforce as well. And that really been an incredibly rewarding lesson to learn. I want to talk a little bit about some of the changes we have made to our hiring process, specifically, because this session is focused on recruiting and hiring, and traditionally, to become a Walgreen''s employee in any area of the company you complete an online application, you take a couple of skills tests and you do an interview. And we knew that if we were going to use those same scales and same measurements for individuals with disabilities, we would not have very many opportunities to offer, simply because people with disabilities just have not had the same opportunities for experiences in skill development as other people. So we created a mechanism to allow individuals with disabilities who come through our partners to have an opportunity to try the job out, to just come on campus with a job coach who already knows how to do that job, they go through the training with other new employees and they come through that experience and have the opportunity to demonstrate to us that they can learn how to do the job and do it well. And this mechanism, right now we are calling it transitional workgroup. But I do not think what we call it is as important as how it works. It has really provided a lot of opportunities to people who would have been bumped out just from the application itself, because a lot of our judgment of a candidate has to do with how they have done in jobs prior, and if somebodys never had an opportunity to work before there is not a fair scale to judge them on. So I really like this method that we have created for this on-the-job trial transitional work group because it allows people to really demonstrate their potential. And in some areas we have time limits on those because of the business needs, those areas have very small opportunities where we can have a lot of work stations that lower productivity, it takes someone longer to learn the job. But it has been great for the larger buildings to be able to give somebody 6 months to learn a job because they continue to show increase in their production rate. We know they are going to get to 100%, just not in the original time frame we had set. There is no magic to that original timeframe. I also want to address a couple of other things about our work in the distribution centers. All of our jobs are full-time. Almost all of our jobs are handling the product as we are unloading trucks from our vendors, sorting that product, getting it ready and organized into the totes that are sent to the stores and packing our Walgreens trucks to be able to move out. That is the majority of our jobs. We do have a couple of administrative positions in each building and about 20 to 30 managers in each building and some minimal other support like the technicians for our equipment and things like that. But the majority of our work force are out there earning an hourly wage and doing a very hard job. It is eight hours of a difficult job every day. There is a lot of overtime. It is not the cleanest environment. It is dusty. And there are days when in some of our buildings we dont have very good environmental controls so it is really hot or it is kind of cold. If you are working in a truck you are definitely dealing with the elements of the weather. But these are good jobs. Our pay rate is based on what the local prevailing wage is for this industry. We dont pay the highest, we dont pay the lowest. Here in Anderson, South Carolina, people start around $12 an hour, full-time, with the same benefits as everybody else for doing the same job. These are good jobs. Walgreens likes to keep their employees. They try very hard to keep their employees happy, to provide challenges for them when they are looking for a challenge and continue to develop and grow their employees. We have had some other experience in this division trying to employ people with disabilities through some enclave situations with a couple of different agencies and through some school to work programs. And we continue to have those programs as they exist in most of our buildings. But what we have tried to do is take those programs and convert them into specific training programs for our transitional workers so that those opportunities are not dead-end opportunities with our company. And if people do not continue on with employment with Walgreens, well that is their choice and what is right for them. But we do want to try and insure as many opportunities as possible for individuals with disabilities. So I think that is it for my part of the presentation. And I believe we want to open it up for questions, Peter?
Yeah. Thanks Deb, and thanks Jennifer. So I can have the Operator come back and give folks instructions on how they can ask questions at this point.
Thank you, Mr. Berg. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press the one key on your touch-tone phone. If your question has been answered, or you wish to leave the queue for any reason, please press the pound key. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press the one key now.
While we are waiting for those questions to come in, I got a question submitted online. It is just asking about the Walgreens retention efforts in keeping employees with disabilities and also if there is potential for training those individuals for you know upward movement within the distribution centers?
Retention has been about the same as the work force that has not disclosed a disability here in Anderson. And this is the only building I can use to judge the retention because this is the only building where we ask employees to disclose. So it is about the same. We do not really judge it against other buildings, because the community here is different. The unemployed rate in this state is very high, so we cannot judge our turnover rate against other buildings. But between people with disabilities and people without disabilities there is not any difference in retention. We have had many, I should not say many, the progression of a career with Walgreens is to start out generally in an hourly position and move up to what is called a function lead, which is kind of an intermediary between the direct line supervisor and the hourly workers. From there they go up to the direct line supervisor, which we call a function manager, from there they go to inbound/outbound managers, manager of operations, and distribution center manager. We have had several of our employees who have disclosed disabilities who have already moved into the function lead position and are continuing to work through our tracks of career development and professional development so that they can continue to move up. It takes time for any individual to work their way up through the ranks. So I do not think we had this initiative going long enough to really determine whether or not we are not being successful in helping people with their career development for those who are interested. But as time goes on, that is actually something that I am monitoring very closely. And hopefully in the next 3 years we will be able to really gauge how many individuals participated in moving up and in other leadership development opportunities that we have and seeing where they have gone from there.
Great. We can go to our first question, please.
Our first question on the phones.
Hi, and I work for an agency that provides employment support. And Deb Russell, my question for you is about the transitional you know placements that you put, are these paid positions or unpaid positions? And sort of what is the expectation on the part of Walgreens for the level of performance during the training period and those kind of things?
It is paid but through a third-party, just like a temp agency. The expectation is that someone continues to improve in their productivity, they are judged on 6 categories: productivity, accuracy, attendance, safety, teamwork, and I am forgetting one. Anyway, they get an evaluation every three weeks or sooner if they would like, on how they are doing toward meeting our standards. And as long as somebody is continuing to improve, it can take them, we have had some people who have done that for 6 months to get up to 100% productivity. And that is fine as long as they are continuing to improve and not plateauing. We have had a couple of people who have plateaued and we worked with their job coaches to implement a couple of different strategies to try to continue to have their, to get their performance to continue back up the incline. And in most instances that has worked. It is just a matter of finding what is the right strategy for those individuals to help them gain the skills that they need to meet our standard.
Can I ask a follow-up question, which is the understanding that, if they hit that 100% performance mark, that is when Walgreens would employ them?
Exactly. As soon as what we say get a yes on 6 questions, as soon as they get 6 yeses they get an instant job offer at the point in time. There is a little caveat to that. We have some buildings who do not constantly hire, they only hire like once a year, so individuals who are in those on-the-job training, transitional work groups, they know when the hiring time is. And so, if they meet the goals sooner, it is possible they will have to wait a month before the job openings come open, but they will get an offer as soon as Walgreens is hiring again.
Thank you.
Alright. Thanks for your question. Go to our next question, please?
Our next question.
I am sorry, if you are on a speakerphone, can you pick up the handset? We are having a little trouble hearing you.
Hi, I am sorry. A quick question for Jennifer, maybe two parts. One, the internship component, do the students get paid at all during that time? I am wondering how transportation costs were taken care of during that internships while they are in high school?
Okay, good questions. They are not paid during their internship. We look at this as the hospital would look at any intern coming into the hospital, whether you are in nursing, OT/PT, doctor, you know, you are earning the final credits you need towards graduation. When it comes to the transportation, the school still has the ultimate responsibility there. So even though we are asking for independent transportation to the work site and are really looking at them accessing our public transportation, if parents are still leery and would like to look at other means of transportation, then the school has come back and funded personalized taxi services for them or have brought the students themselves, until we can reach that comfort level of independent transportation.
And the second part would be, you have collaboration, which is great. Does it ever get difficult when you are talking about the funding for job coaches from state VR? You have got the school paying the teacher who is involved with the sign language, and the rehab, you know; the idea of supervision, the idea of really collaboration for the individual?
I am not exactly sure. I am seeing your question from two views. Can you clarify it?
I am just talking about supervision and consistency of service delivery.
So supervision for the staff that is here?
Yeah.
Really, we still, even though I am supervised by my supervisor back at Great Oaks, I still run under the auspices of Project Search here at Children''s. It is our Director or even our Assistant Director who still oversees the program. In another business it might be the business liaison. So if they are having issues with how that person who is here on site is performing, then they have the right to address that with the person and even ask that the person be removed.
The coaches are supervised by who?
Those coaches are supervised by the teacher.
Okay. So basically, the school is responsible for the supervision of the coaches that the state pays for.
Correct.
Alright, thank you for your questions.
Thank you.
As we go to our next question, if you are on a speakerphone, please make sure the phone is directly in front of you and if all possible, please pick up the handset when you ask your question. May we have our next question, please?
Thank you. Our next question.
Go ahead, with your question.
Hi. And I have a question for both Deb as well as Jennifer. Do you all provide any services to persons with mental illness?
Jennifer, go ahead.
Okay, I will take that first. Our primary group of individuals that we look at here are those individuals with cognitive disabilities. But what we are finding is that a lot of our folks have underlying dual diagnoses there where they have some mental health issues. So we have become rather adept at working you know with those people who have more of the mental health issues there, especially when it is coupled with a cognitive disability.
This is Deb. We do not provide services to anybody. But if you are asking if we would employ people with a mental illness, it does not really matter to us what somebodys disability is, as long as they can do the job.
Excellent. Jennifer, again a question submitted online for you. The question wants to know about, how when you do presentations to other healthcare providers, how is the program received by other institutions and the efforts that Children''s is taking on?
The program is received very well by other agencies, other businesses that are inviting us in because we can really gear our talk towards our audience. For example, if I would have a hospital call and say they be interested in hearing about this program, then it would be Erin, who is still a Manager here at Childrens who would go out and speak with them. If there was somebody coming from the school setting who really wanted to learn more about our program, then it would be our school expert. You know so, when we go out and talk, we are able really to gear our talks to our audience and have been very well-received. I think currently we have over 90 sites across the United States that are in one stage or another of looking at replicating our program, from just someone expressing interest to someone having a program starting in the fall.
And Deb, I ask that question to you as well, when you are doing presentations within the business arena or business leadership network, how is the Walgreens program being received?
Very well. Myself and Randy both do presentations quite a bit at industry conferences and other events. And the response level we get is pretty high, the response being followed up either a conference call for consultation between Randy, myself and their leadership, and/or tours of the building here, between that kind of follow up, we have been working with over 70 different companies.
Excellent. All right. Do we have our next question please?
Our next question on the phones.
Good morning. And I would like to know, Deb, you mentioned working with partners to provide a workforce. And I know we had talked about vocational rehabilitation as well as the schools. But can you provide some other examples of what other partners that you use?
Sure. I am not sure I can list them all. They are on our web site, walgreensoutreach.com. Each distribution center has their partners listed. I know in some areas we have partnered with Goodwill, in some areas we have partnered with agencies that are funded through the DDMR system, with some agencies that are funded through the mental health system, private, public, I do not think that there has been a limitation on who we have partnered with as long as they are interested in serving people with disabilities and having people with disabilities be successful in employment. In fact, we are currently looking for more partners, because we are starting to dry up the wells of the available workforce from our current partners.
Can you give the web address again? One more time, Deb.
www.walgreensoutreach.com. And there is a tab for distribution centers and from there you can select each distribution center and go to their individual pages. I think it is the community page that talks about who their partners are.
Alright, great. Thanks. May we have our next question, please?
Our next question.
Hi, good afternoon. And a very quick question, I think it is more pressed to Jennifer with respect to students or adults with disabilities working and then having to forfeit or maybe forego some of their Social Security disability benefits or has that ever come into play where they would have to forfeit? Or how do you work that out?
That is a very good question. I would have bet you about 25% of my time is spent on those Social Security issues. And one of the things I do when students come in is I do a lot of education with them and their parents on how working affects their benefits. And then with each individual that comes through, I do get permission from them to get a BPQY, are you familiar with that from Social Security?
Yes.
And then with that, we kind of use that as a tool as we are working here and planning as to when they may lose those benefits. If they are real reluctant and need to hang on to it for some reason, then we work with the department to put subsidies in place. If there are subsidies in place, and then, you know, educate them every step of the way. Okay, you got another raise this year, this is how long the subsidy will be able to stay in place. It is not a forever thing. So in the 12 years we have been here, I think we have had 6 adults who have successfully worked their way off of benefits. I have others who, because they are working part-time or have those subsidies, they are still kind of hanging on there to their benefits.
Thank you. Thank you.
Alright, great. Go to our next question please?
Our next question.
Go ahead with your question, please.
Your line is open.
Go to our next question, please.
Our next question.
Go ahead with your question. Do you have your phone on mute? No? Alright, why don''t we go on to our next question.
Our next question.
Hi, and I have a follow up question about the transitional work group for Deb with Walgreens. The Cincinnati situation had 3 job coaches that they paid for. And I would assume that is because you have a job coach that gets to know that culture, that work environment and then they are working with multiple employees. And I was wondering if when you talked about having a third-party pay for your job coaches and that someone could come in with a job coach, did you hire job coaches yourself that would consistently work there? Or how did you identify the job coaches?
In most cases the partner identified the job coach. Part of a partnership with us is to understand our job. So, most entities that partner with us send some of their staff over to work each department in our building just to get an idea of what it means to work there, because that helps them with the pre-screening as well. And then as individuals come from the agency to job coach their clients, our potential employees, they work with the function managers and other direct line supervisors and other workers around them to try incorporate natural supports because it is important to us that individuals be able to fade from their job coaches as much as possible and as much as their funding allows, obviously. So in most cases the job coach is an employee of the agency that we have partnered with but that is not true in all cases. We have two buildings right now who have grants from voc rehab because the entities that voc rehab was working with had difficulty keeping a consistent staff person in that position and we cannot count on support being there for the training of our employees. And so in those cases, individuals who are already inside our buildings have been identified as having skill sets appropriate for a job coaching. And so when there is an individual who needs to be job coached, they go from there whatever position they are doing the rest of the time there to filling in the coaching role. We actually have one of our buildings that is in an area with they pay significantly higher than the non-profits in that area. And so they have many ex-job coaches that works for them. It has been nice to be able to take advantage of that additional skill set to ensure that people get the support that they need.
Thank you.
Alright, great. Deb, I know that the project that you are working on, the distribution centers going forward, I heard you speak last week at the ADA Symposium in St. Louis. You talked about something that you are doing to expose managers and staff from your existing distribution centers to the Andersen site. I am wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.
Sure. It is part of helping our current work force deal with any fears they might have or any lack of opportunity they have had to work with people with disabilities where managers from other distribution buildings come to Anderson and for a week we have them in an immersion, we call it boot camp where they spend structured time and unstructured time with our team members on the floor, some who they know that the person has a disability and some they do not know whether the person has a disability. And then we have structured activities at the end of each shift to try to help guide the managers through their learning curve of gaining that comfort level with people with disabilities. And I think I was sharing at that presentation, Peter, that we are pretty excited because usually, by Wednesday, we are getting people who are saying, Oh, I forgot that they had a disability; Oh, I forgot that anybody out there has a disability. And that is what we are trying to get them to, to where the point that the disability is not the thing that sticks out in their mind. It is the workers sense of humor or the workers work skills or something else about them that becomes the defining factor for that individual.
Great. Thanks. May we have our next question please?
Our next question on the phones.
Go ahead with your question. Do you have your phone on mute?
Hello?
Go ahead. Nope, alright, why don''t we move on to our next question, see if we can get back to those folks that we did not hear their question.
Okay, our next question comes.
Go ahead with your question.
I would like to know, do you have a specific educational curriculum that you provide to your employees who are working with the disabled? Or do you just gather it as the situation arises? And would you be willing to share those educational materials?
Alright, is that question for Jennifer or Deb?
Either one, both.
Jennifer, do you want to?
Okay. We do not have any specific curriculum out there of working or educating the managers. But as you stated, a lot of that is done as need be. I mean, we have done things like brown bag luncheons, you know which is during the lunch hour. We invite people to come and learn about how it is to work with a person with a disability. I do have some of that available that I could send out. We often go into the departments when an individual starts, kind of work with the department on working with a person with a disability. And if there is anything specific to the individual that is coming in, then we kind of address that. So, you know we tried to do it on a wide scale at the hospital but we find it is more effective when we do it as we are asked.
And we have the same experience at Walgreens. We have tried to provide a lot of different experiences for our managers, visiting other companies nearby who employ people with disabilities. Or as I said having I know at least one of our buildings had the agency that serves people who are blind in there and bring in some assistive technology. Several buildings have hosted a panel of employees with different disabilities or individuals with different disabilities to have the opportunity for that kind of education for their employees. Here in Anderson, South Carolina, where we have such a very large, significant portion of our employees who have disabilities, we have disability etiquette tucked into the rest of our new employee orientation that deals with communication skills and treating all of your co-workers with respect and teamwork, so that we do not really pull it out as a separate topic here. As situations have arisen, we have designed particular PowerPoints to help work with that specific audience on whatever issues they have, but it is nothing that you cannot find anywhere when you Google disability etiquette on the internet. There isnt any real trick or you know master volume to this, it is just working with people where they are at and helping them get over their fears.
Alright, great. Alright, may we have our next question?
Our next question.
Go ahead with your question.
Your line is open.
Okay, go to the next question please.
Our next question.
Can you hear me?
Yes, go ahead.
This counts as me being, okay? Regarding the benefits, can you talk a little bit about those, and especially about health insurance?
Which person are you asking that question to?
Either one of you. We have one follow up if we can do that.
Alright, lets go to Deb first.
This is Walgreens. Our employees make enough money that they lose their Social Security checks and they get benefits from us. And so if there is a need for Medicaid services through the Medicaid buy-in in the state, that is for individuals to master. We do try to make sure that all of our employees who have disclosed that they have a disability are made aware of the WIPA in our state, and the individuals who represent the WIPA in this part of South Carolina has been here many times. He has actually sat through our new employee orientation and he has a good understanding of the benefits that we offer and can provide good informed or assistance for informed decision-making for those individuals who are facing that.
And here at Cincinnati Children''s, probably about 75% of the individuals that we have employed are eligible for the hospital benefits. Only about half of those take the benefits. Some of them are still on the parent benefits, do not want to risk losing that. And so for various reasons they opt out of that, those benefit package there.
Alright. What was your follow up question?
Both of your organizations, the Childrens Hospital and Walgreens, have an overarching diversity program. Do they include people with disabilities within that diversity program in addition to what you have been talking about today?
Here at Cincinnati Children''s, we do have a large diversity department. The Project Search itself is not under that, but we collaborate with them on a lot of the issues. And when we look at the hiring needs around the hospital, we are often working in conjunction with the diversity department. When we do training you know, the education of people with disabilities can often come in through the diversity angle. You know, last week I was even at a sexual harassment training and they were talking about one of the types of harassment that can happen at a hospital being based on a person''s disability. So I was able to kind of speak to that and how you know in a work setting you deal with someone with a disability. If they are the ones harassing or even if they are the ones being harassed.
And at Walgreens we have a relatively new diversity strategy department and disability is a part of that. But just like Project Search, the efforts that our division has in this area extends far beyond what our diversity department is focused on, although disability is a part of that. But again, our initiative is only in a very small part of the company.
Do the diversity initiatives, do comprehensive recruiting of minorities and women and other diversity groups one thing they are not looking at now?
I believe they are. I do not work for that department so I cannot address exactly what they do.
You know if people with disabilities are included in the recruiting effort alongside the minorities and other things?
I believe so. I know that the website that describes our diversity efforts list people with disabilities as one of the categories for diversity.
Alright. Thank you for your question. May we have our next question, please?
Our next question comes.
Go ahead.
I have a question for Deb. Do you have any rough estimates of the workers with the disabilities you have at Walgreens, kind of what are the percentage of people that are in the enclave scenario? What are the percentage of people in that trial transition workgroup? And what are the estimates for people that are getting paid the $12 an hour jobs?
Well, the only people that I know a lot about are the people who are actually Walgreens employees. I am not sure about the total number of people we have in enclaves across the country. If I can remember off the top of my head, which is really a bad idea to do. I would say it is somewhere around 40 individuals or 50 individuals who are in enclaves. Sometimes a contractual agreement, that is actually you know the agency determines how many people come. Some of those enclaves can only come a couple times a week. Some of them are there full-time. The transitional work groups, I usually keep a tally and I am sorry that I do not have it in front of me, but I believe that we have about 26 individuals who are in the transitional work group right now. I am not trying to imply that those individuals are not making the exact hourly wage of what our employees are making. That is actually determined on, negotiated on a case by case basis with the agencies that are paying them.
Okay, and can I ask one other quick question? You mentioned that you have some criticisms from the disability community. Is there any way to be specific like who from the, not who names, but what type of groups were critical?
We have been accused of being a sheltered workshop because we have an unnaturally high proportion of people with disabilities in our workforce in Anderson, South Carolina. I think the implication is that for some reason, critics believe that we have people with disabilities work separate in the building, or that we are not paying them the same, we are not holding them to the same standards. I traditionally kind of disregard those criticisms because obviously those people have not been here to see the work force and the work that is going on.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for your questions. May have our next question please?
Our next question.
Hi, thank you. This is a good segue from the last answer and this is a question for Deb. Deb, I also had the pleasure of seeing you last week in St. Louis, it was a really good presentation, but I have been curious about what the reaction has been from the employees without disabilities and/or the employees who have chosen not to disclose the disability, you know based again on that unusually high percentage of employees with disabilities in the work place. Has there been any issue with acceptance or with their feeling that they are, in fact, part of a community-based sheltered employment setting?
No. I do not think our work force in Anderson has heard this criticism, it is something that is out on the web. So as we are trying to recruit more partners, those are the ones who are reluctant to join us because they heard we are a sheltered workshop. Our work force itself, here in Anderson, and I guess it is one of the reason I am doing, help people with at some point in their life have the opportunity to experience an inclusive work place, our work force of people who do not have disabilities do not view the work force of people who do have disabilities as any different group. In fact, I am probably the only person in this building that makes the distinction between the two groups as I talk about the initiative. But here it is, disabilities like hair color is just not a distinguishing characteristic of anybody here. And so, for individuals who do get the opportunity to come to this building, they have really, that is one of the highest comments we get is that first of all the people on the tour could not tell who had a disability, except for a few individuals who have physical characteristics that are obvious. And that is you know, in the break room and every other component of being an employee and living your life disability is a non-factor in Anderson. So we had concerns that, perhaps, our work force of people without disabilities or with undisclosed disabilities would have some resentment issues or have some concerns about the work force who had disclosed that they have a disability. And we have been very excited to find out that our fears about that were completely irrelevant.
Alright, great. Thanks for your question. May we go to our next question, please.
Our next question.
Hi. This question is for Jennifer. Currently, we operate 3 work environments and part of our eligibility requirements, we require a psychological evaluation for proof of disability. My question is, if and what type of disability, documentation of disability, do you require for people with disability with Search?
Really, the documentation we require is that they be on an IEP from their school system. So often times, as part of that IEP, there is the psychological, there is a lot of other assessments though that are done through the school. So that does not always happen but the primary documentation that we look for is the IEP.
Okay. Thank you.
Alright, great. Why don''t we try to get one more question before we reach the bottom of the hour.
Our next question.
Hello?
Go ahead.
Yes, my question is for the Walgreens. You mentioned a number of times the fears of employees in relating or working with people with disabilities, what specifically were the fears that were addressed? And what the employees brought up in terms of their fears working with people with disabilities?
Thanks for your questions.
Most of the stereotypical things, safety, that for some reason they had this fear that people with disabilities would not be as safe as the rest of our work force. Fear of saying the wrong thing, like see you later to somebody who is blind, and that that would be considered offensive. That a lot of the fears of people with disabilities being able to meet our productivity standards and our other performance standards. So a lot of it was just stereotypes that I think come through the media or through experiences with people with disabilities who may not be successfully employed. We actually had quite a few stated issues or potential issues from people who had family members who have disabilities but those family members are not successfully employed or have not had successful competitive employment situations. And so it was just working through a lot of those pre-conceived notions and providing them the opportunity to actually talk to a person with a disability or several people with a variety of different disabilities and spend some time with them and realize that it is just like talking with everybody else or interacting with everybody else and that a lot of the stereotypes that exist in society just are not true for the individuals who are employed here.
Excellent. Thank you, very much, Deb. I want to thank both Jennifer and Deb for sharing their valuable time with us today. I am sure we could have kept going with a lot of the questions. We got through the 90 minutes pretty quickly. If you were not able to have your question answered, I would encourage you to contact your regional ADA Center by calling 800-949-4232 with those questions. Also would encourage you to join us in June on the 17th when the topic of the ADA Audio Conference series will be Accommodating Employees with Psychiatric Disabilities. We will have Dory Hutchinson from the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University joining us as the speaker and we will have Erica Jones, the Projects Director from the Pacific ADA Center as our guest moderator. You can get additional information about the June 17th session as well as get access to the audio archives of past sessions by visiting the ADA Audio website www.ada-audio.org. Once again, I would like to thank Jennifer and Deb for their time today and want thank all of you for participating with us. Have a great day.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation for todays conference. This concludes the program and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.