December 19, 2008_
ERIN RIEHLE


******* 


	>> ERIN RIEHLE:  Hi, my name is Erin Riehle, and I am the 
director and founder of project search, and I am delighted to be 
here working with ECU for this Web cast today.  My presentation 
will be talking about jobs in the public sector.  I will be 
talking about how we have had programs in public sector, giving 
you some examples and talking about some barriers and some 
common resolutions and then ending with some of our strategies 
to increase the employment of people in public sector.  

	I actually am a nurse by profession, and I have a masters in 
nursing administration and have worked really all of my life in 
health care, and the truth is that I had no experience in the 
disability world whatsoever.  I did not have friends who had 
disabilities.  I did not have co-workers with disabilities.  I 
think my only exposure had really been when I saw people with 
disabilities who might be bagging groceries or people with 
disabilities who might work in fast-food restaurants cleaning 
off tables.  I think I had really grown up as an American 
believing that those are the only things that people with 
disabilities were capable of, and I did not see them in any 
other kind of light.  

	A couple years ago, thirteen years ago, I had with I lovingly 
refer to as my disability epiphany moment, kind of my great 
wake-up call.  A couple of things happened in my life.  The 
first was that I was the director of a very large emergency 
department, and I had a large number of support positions.  They 
were the type of support positions that could be filled with 
people who needed short- or moderate-term on-the-job training.  

   I found myself constantly hiring the same kind of folks over 
and over again, but they weren't necessarily people who honored 
the work.  Most of them were looking at it as a job and not a 
career, and many of them stayed only three to six months until 
they had a better option.  I was spending a lot in turnover and 
in training, and the jobs weren't being done well.  

	At the same time, I had an opportunity to do my budget. 
Hospitals in America list our revenue by diagnosis, and so I was 
able to look at the top ten revenue generators for our hospital 
by diagnostic category.  What jumped out at me from the paper 
was that ten of our top 20 revenue generators at Cincinnati 
Children's Hospital were directly related to people with 
disabilities.  So here we were.  

   We were a large institution which on one hand, we talk 
constantly about valuing diversity.  We were serving people with 
disabilities and yet, we had never really reached out to say 
that we believe that people with disabilities should also be 
productively employed members of our own staff.

    Thirteen years ago, I got together with schools and DRS and 
MHMR, ESOs, and agency vendors.  We sat down and decided that we 
would try to create a program that would work within business to 
allow us to hire people with disabilities.  The truth is we 
started in health care, and that is what I know best, but the 
reason I am here today is because since that day 13 years ago, 
we have now branched out and replicated our program in the 
public sector all across the country.  

   We have programs in Vancouver, Washington.  We have public-
sector programs in Leicester, England and Indianapolis, Indiana 
in their county offices.  We have programs in Miami, Florida in 
their city government.  What we have found is that now, we're 
getting more and more calls as public sector folks realize that 
there's huge potential here. 
 
	What I want to start off with, I want to talk to you 
specifically about why hiring people with disabilities has been 
important to our hospital.  You may be sitting there thinking 
well, we're not a hospital, but what I have found is that this 
slide would probably be more appropriately titled, "Why is 
hiring people with disabilities important to our business?" We 
found it has been important across many sectors.  

   Number one, and I already mentioned this, people with chronic 
illnesses and disabilities are a major source of hospital 
revenue and we want to be their provider of choice.  When we 
began hiring people with disabilities, we didn't do it as a 
charitable or a philanthropic move.  We did it because it's 
smart business.  It's the smart thing to do, and if we're going 
to grow as a business and if our hospital is going to stay 
viable, then we need to be working with the people who are 
coming to us.  We figured out and learned a long time ago that 
in order to attract more people to come to us as patients, we 
needed to first honor them as people.  One of the biggest ways 
you can do that is to hire.  

	The second reason, as a business that exists to serve the 
public, we believe we should reflect the public. I think this is 
even more true for government and public sector operations.  I 
think that if conservative estimates are that ten percent of the 
United States population has disabilities, then we need anywhere 
in which the public is interacting with the business or public 
sector to make sure that our work force reflects the very people 
we're serving.  

	People with disabilities work in our environment and enhance 
our image, and we receive positive feedback.  There was a Gallup 
poll done two Septembers ago by Neil Romano and Phil 
Silberstein.  I know VCU has a Web cast on which Neil Romano 
talks about the results, but one of them is really applicable to 
this situation.  They polled Americans on their attitudes of 
people with disabilities working, and they found that 88 percent 
of Americans said that if they had a choice between doing 
business at two like entities such as a Home Depot and a Lowes, 
88 percent of them said that they would choose to do business 
with a company that hired people with disabilities.  It had 
nothing to do with whether the respondents had a family member 
or significant other with a disability.  

	What it boiled down to was the impression, the perception 
that if a business hires a person with a disability, then they 
are probably a kinder, gentler, better place for anyone to work 
and for anyone to do business.  In a nutshell, they are 
perceived to be a more welcoming environment, and we in the 
healthcare business want to be perceived to be the most 
welcoming environment possible.  I believe public sector has the 
same goal.  Our employees with disabilities serve as role models 
for our patients and families and give them a sense of hope. 

   I've told the story many times.  There was a situation once 
where we had a mom and she had given birth to a baby with Down 
syndrome and the baby and the mom where air-flighted into our 
hospital for surgery.  The mom wrote a letter to the president 
of the hospital and said, here I was sitting in this room, and I 
was sobbing and I felt like, you know, my world -- the floor had 
just dropped out of my world and did not know where to turn 
next.  

   She said the next thing that happened changed my life and 
that is that a young woman with Down syndrome walked into the 
room, took a look at my baby and said what a cute baby and then 
proceeded to stock every single supply in that room.  The mom 
said that moment changed my life because I knew right then and 
there that my child could grow up to be a productively employed 
citizen and give back, and that is what she had been feeling 
would be impossible.   

	Our recruitment of talent is positively impacted.  In the 
last five years, we have hired a new chief of staff, a new chief 
surgeon, a new head of our cardiovascular research department, 
and a new head of our Down syndrome clinic.  All four of those 
men were heavily recruited from across the world, actually, and 
all four of them wanted to meet with me.  The reason they wanted 
to meet with me wasn't because I am special.  The reason they 
wanted to meet with me was that all four men had young adult 
children with disabilities.  As part of their recruitment 
decision, they wanted to be in a community that they knew would 
honor their young adult children and provide opportunities.  It  
goes to being perceived as a welcoming environment and welcoming 
community.  

	Universal design helps all employees.  Most all of you know 
what that means.  Universal design is simply that body of 
knowledge that says that whenever we put something in place for 
a person with a disability, it is likely to help everyone in 
that environment, disability or not.  We certainly have seen 
that at Children's Hospital.  Employment is the number one 
priority of young adults, not health care, and belief in a 
productive future increases compliance.  We have seen our costs 
go down productivity wise.  Our productivity has gone up which 
has decreased our cost.  This has been because we have begun to 
say to every person we work with we believe you will grow up and 
be productively employed.  You must do your part to be compliant 
in healthcare. 
 
	People with chronic illnesses and disabilities represent the 
fastest growing market segment in the United States.  In 2007, 
it was estimated that they control one trillion dollars in 
aggregate spending.  If you add their significant others, it's 
about three trillion dollars.  As a hospital, we have decided 
that we cannot afford to dismiss that kind of financial power.  
If we do so, we do so at our own peril and we believe that we 
need to work with those folks to show that we value them, not 
just because they bring money, but because we believe they have 
much to offer to our hospital. When I think about our programs 
in public sector, the same is true.  For every person with a 
disability who is employed, they are paying taxes.  They bring a 
welcomingness to the environment that isn't necessarily there 
before.  

	In our case, as a business, families with relatives with 
disabilities have increased their gifts to our programs.  We 
have experienced increased local, regional, and national 
recognition.  Maybe most importantly, performance and retention 
in some of our high turnover positions has increased 
dramatically.  

	As I mentioned, we started out in health care, but we now 
have programs in public sector across the country, and actually, 
across the world.  I wanted to just go over a few of the 
specific benefits to the public sector that we have seen to 
date.  

	Number one, employing people with disabilities fits within a 
city or county stated goal of a diversified work force.  You 
really cannot count the work force as being diverse unless 
you're also reaching out to a population that is mirrored by ten 
percent of the people living in your community.  If you want to 
be a welcoming environment where everyone feels like you are 
welcome at the table and welcome to come in for services, then 
you must include people with disabilities.  

	The second one is availability of job training and long-term 
support.  What we have found in public sector is that when we 
hire people with disabilities, as a business, there is support 
in the community so there's no need to go down this path alone.  
There are many agencies, ESOs, vendors, and schools that are 
there to support you as you began to employ people with 
disabilities.  

	Employing people with disabilities offers public sector the 
potential for increased co-worker stability.  We have certainly 
seen our tenure increased dramatically in departments where we 
had rapid turnover before.  We also have seen our absenteeism go 
down across the board in those departments where we hire people 
with disabilities.

   I will just give you a really good example.  It is really 
hard for a co-worker to call in and say, well, I cannot get to 
work today because I cannot get out of my driveway because there 
is a little bit of snow and then find out that a person with a 
disability who needed to take public transportation to get to 
work made it in on the same day.  I just think it changes minds 
and attitudes of co-workers.  

	As I mentioned before, hiring people with disabilities 
definitely increases the welcoming factor, and I believe that it 
is key in the public sector.  

	The last benefit is that the prescreening that can be done by 
partners that you work with in the rehab community is a huge 
timesaving benefit to organizations that are out there. 
 
	Now, what are we seeing as some of the common barriers? 
Again, when we work with public sector, many things come up, and 
the barriers tend to be the same in most areas.  One is that in 
public sector there is typically a competitive hiring process 
that may involve testing.  In may involve some experience or 
education requirements, and what we have done is try to resolve 
that.  

   We sat down with the decision makers, with the decision 
enforcers, administrators, HR, and with the people who are doing 
the work and said, okay.  We know that there are competitive 
hiring processes.  How do we work with you to also ensure that 
those competitive hiring processes are not serving as blocks to 
your ability to hire people with disabilities? What we found as 
some solutions is that there are cases where a person with a 
disability can be brought on and allowed to perform the job for 
a trial period, about 6-9 months, and that job trial can 
actually serve as the test.  

	There is something else you can do.  You can develop a 
transition program with a local high school and bring students 
in at no cost to the institution.  It is a win/win for everybody 
and allows them to go through internships in your departments so 
that they learn skills, and you also get to see them as people 
and see what they are capable of and then having an opportunity 
to hire those who are qualified.  

	And lastly, in terms of this one, one of the solutions for 
this barrier is that you can teach components of the test during 
the year.  The other thing we hear about as a barrier is job 
classifications.  Some of the things we have done related to 
that, to solving that, are to restructure some job duties to be 
reclassified, when possible, to actual performance and to create 
new job classes.

   Then, there are unions.  I probably need to say by default 
that I am actually a card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO.  I 
drove a forklift for many years in my life, and I believe that 
unions, for the most part, are incredibly supportive of hiring 
people with disabilities, as long as they are involved from day 
one.  

	What we have found is that people with disabilities are eager 
to pay dues.  They are eager to follow the rules.  They are 
eager to be part of a system and are incredibly valuable as 
union members so again.  We recommend including the union 
representative in planning from day one about employment of 
people with disabilities.  We also include supportive employment 
positions and collective bargaining agreements in some places of 
the country.  

	One thing that we do in public sector is that we have tried 
to stay away from what those perceived easy jobs, not that it is 
not honorable work because it is.  It is incredibly honorable 
work to bag groceries and to work in fast-food, and many people 
want that.  The problem is that when 60 percent of any 
population, such as people with developmental disabilities, is 
found only in those areas, that is statistically impossible.  
What it says is that we are placing them there, rather than it 
being about their choice.  

   So what our project has done in public sector and in health 
care is try to show that people with disabilities are capable of 
doing incredibly complex and systematic work, complex and 
routine work, and that public sector health care, insurance, big 
business are full of positions that are complex and systematic. 
 
	This is a very unscientific slide.  I have no data to back it 
up.  But it's kind of my perception of how people with 
disabilities might learn just a little bit differently on 
occasion.  Many people without disabilities and some people with 
disabilities learn according to a very standard model so they 
learn their jobs quickly and they follow the Bell curve.  They 
do not need anything different than perhaps a regular 
orientation.  

   Some people with disabilities, and in fact, some people 
without disabilities, do not learn in that same fashion.  All 
we've been able to do is say, if we put in place a program that 
acknowledges that people with disabilities can probably get to 
the same exact place of performance, it is just that their path 
may look different.  

  So they may have to learn a few skills and then practice them 
and then learn a few more and then practice those.  I think the 
whole point is we have learned, in our organization, that there 
are different paths to learning or education, and just because a 
person with a disability may take a different path doesn't mean 
that it's a bad path.  It just means it is a different path.  
Often, the outcome in performance is exactly the same.  

	What I want to do now, and again, I know health care best so 
I'm going to start off by discussing some of those jobs.  I 
think that one of my biggest challenges, when I work and when I 
talk with people, is that -- and I think this is pretty normal, 
and I certainly have done it myself -- I think we tend to think 
that the job we are doing is so incredibly important that no one 
else can do it, or that it would be difficult for someone else 
to do it.

   That is particularly apparent when it comes to talking about 
people with disabilities.   You know, we look at our jobs and we 
think well, gosh, my job is so critical that there's no way a 
person with a disability could do that.  I have to tell you, I 
do not necessarily think that is true.  I do not agree with that 
based on what I have learned over the past few years.  
Hopefully, these next few stories I share with you from our 
hospital will really make it clear to you that people with 
disabilities can do many jobs, including some of the jobs that 
are most critical to our operation.  

	So I am just going to tell some stories, and I do have 
permission to mention their names and their diagnosis and some 
other relevant information.  This is a young woman by the name 
of any Annie Sublet.  Annie has Down syndrome, and Annie was the 
first person with a disability I ever hired, and she worked with 
me in the emergency department where she stocked supplies.  She 
was our stocking technician and she was responsible for 58 
rooms.  Annie was probably the best stocker I have ever had.  
That's s-t-o-c-k-e-r.  And Annie did a great job.  She came to 
work every day.  If I asked her to count items, she did it.  If 
I asked her to rotate stock, she did it.  If I asked her to 
check dates, she did it, and things were going really, really 
well.  

	And about six months after I hired Annie, the head of the 
dental clinic came to me and said, you know, we need a person to 
sterilize our dental instruments.  Do you think there is a 
chance that Annie Sublet could do that? We know you have had 
her.  We know she has come to work and done a super job.  We 
would like to try her out.  Well, I think I did what most people 
without disabilities do, and I did not even bother to call Annie 
and ask her if she was interested in trying it.  I did not call 
her family.  I just decided that it would be okay for me to make 
a decision on Annie's behalf.  

   And in this case, unfortunately, I made the decision to fail 
on her behalf, and I'll show you why.  She had worked with me in 
the emergency department for six months, and she was our best 
stocker.  When I was asked about a transfer, her moving to the 
dental clinic, all I could remember was that she could not find 
her locker in our locker room, and she did not know how to open 
the combination lock.  Instead of looking at everything she 
could do well, I looked at the two things she could not do, and 
I extrapolated her whole performance based on those two things.  

	Now, fortunately, I went home.  I thought about it, and I 
thought you know what? I really do not think Annie can do this, 
but at the same time, I do not know.  The one thing I am certain 
of is that in my life, I have been given my own opportunities to 
both succeed or fail.  No one has ever done it for me, and so I 
decided at that moment in time that I would make sure that every 
person with a disability got the same opportunity I had.  

	This next slide is a picture of Annie Sublet today, 13 years 
later.  She has worked for 13 years in our dental clinic.  We 
have a 15-room dental clinic.  The cases turn over every 30 
minutes, and Annie Sublet is the only person who sterilizes and 
processes every dental instrument that we put into a person's 
mouth at our hospital.  

   I hope what you understand about this is that it is an 
incredibly critical job.  You can't put a dirty instrument into 
someone's mouth.  It is life-threatening.  And here you have a 
person with a significant disability who is doing this job 
better than anyone ever has before and has stayed in this job 
almost five times longer than anyone ever had before.  

	And you know what? This is all it took for her to be able to 
open her locker, nothing more than a laser lock.  You aim the 
little laser at the laser in the lock and it pops open.  It is 
funny because if you walked into this locker room today where 
Annie works, you would see about a half dozen of these and it is 
not because we have a half-dozen people with disabilities 
working there.  It is because for many of us, we have a 
difficult time opening our combination lock.  Annie is not that 
different from any of us, and what we put in place to help her 
resolve this issue helped many people in the department.  

	My next slide is Heidi Hamms.  When Heidi starting working 
with us, she wanted to work with babies and we did not have any 
positions working in the nursery at the time.  But we do have a 
55-bed neonatal intensive care unit, and we have a huge fleet of 
isolettes and incubators.  Those isolettes and incubators have 
to be carefully sterilized and processed because you cannot put 
a preemie in a piece of equipment that is a dirty or does not 
meet quality assurance measures.  Heidi was very interested in 
doing this job and what is fascinating about it to me is that 
this is the way she learned her job, nothing more than a series 
of pictures that our partner agency put on the wall and used to 
train her.  I should tell you that every isolette has more than 
44 removable parts.  

   She has to take them apart, sterilize them, put them back 
together again.  She checks the filter, the water level, the 
electrical circuitry, and the health and safety tag.  She is the 
only person responsible for these.  She actually was hired by 
our hospital by Sodexho Marriott, and they approached us several 
years ago and said, you know what, Heidi is better at this job 
than anyone we know.  Can we begin to use her as a national 
trainer?

	This slide shows you a man who had been newly hired by 
Sodexho Marriott in Chicago.  He had flown in for the day to 
work with Heidi just to learn how to take care of isolettes and 
incubators, and the sign says, congratulations and thank you to 
Heidi Hamms for training your 200th manager.  

	Oximetry probes.  This is not that special of a job, but it's 
a job we could not fill because no one was interested in it, and 
each patient is given an oximetry probe.  They cost us $18 new, 
but they can be recycled twice, and you only have to pay $6 each 
time.  We were throwing them away because it was a tedious 
process that had many steps.  First of all, you have to wipe it 
down with a sterilizing agent.  You had to check the color of 
the tag to make sure it had not already been recycled too many 
times.  You had to check the head of the probe to make sure it 
was not broken, and you could only put 40 in one given bag when 
you sent it back to the manufacturer.  We could not find anyone 
who wanted to do this job.  Then we hired Nick. 
 
	The thing is, Nick cannot count to 40, and he also can only 
use one of his arms.  Now, in the past, I would have looked at 
this and said, how can Nick do it if he cannot count to 40 and 
that is one of the job requirements? What I have learned is 
there are many ways to figure things out.  Our partners created 
for us this lazy Susan, or this standing jig.  It is made out of 
plywood.  It is a piece of plywood on top that rotates and into 
that they cut 40 slots and so once Nick fills every slot, he 
does not have to count because there are automatically 40.  
Because they're hanging, he can pull his chair up underneath and 
use his stronger arm to wipe it down, and at the end of this 
past fiscal year on June 30th, our hospital had saved $1.1 
million by recycling oximetry probes in a job that we could not 
get anyone else to take.
  
	Jill Frambis.  Jill has worked for us for about 12 years, and 
she works in our clinical sterilization department.  I do not 
know how many of you have had surgery, probably a lot, but when 
you go into OR, you have what is called an OR case kit.  That is 
where they keep all of the instruments.  Jill Frambis at our 
hospital is one of the people who processes and sterilizes every 
case kit.  

	Now, the particular kit you see on this page has 152 
instruments.  It is a laparotomy tray.  It is used to do have 
abdominal surgery.  This tray has just come out of a pressure 
washer.  Jill is going to dump that out, and she is going to put 
those instruments back into a case kit in the exact order that 
they will be used by the surgeon from last instrument to first. 

   She has to even know if the tray is going to be a left-handed 
or right-handed tray because then she has to start them from the 
opposite sides.  She has been doing this for nine years, and in 
that time, she has made one error.  Every step of this process 
is bar coded and she has to swipe her badge against the bar code 
so that we can look at the quality assurance for every step.  

	This is what the pick list that they use to train people used 
to look like.  This is how it was modified by our partners to 
allow us to teach Jill.  This is Jill today.  It is actually a 
totally staged picture.  She has not used a book in years, but I 
wanted you to see that she has exactly the same work area that 
anybody else in that department does.  She wears exactly the 
same uniform.  She comes to work at exactly the same time.  Now, 
what's remarkable to me about this is that this department has a 
productivity number of 25 trays.  They expect every employee who 
works here to complete 25 trays a day.  Jill has decided that 
she would like the number of trays she produces a day to match 
her age in a given year.  She's 32 this year so Jill is now 
doing 32 trays.

	Marty Eckis.  Marty has spastic cerebral palsy.  Her speech 
is unintelligible.  She needed a very, very few accommodations 
and adaptations, but she has a degree in IT.  No one had ever 
given her a chance.  We hired her, and she now audits our 
nursing documentation, our online documentation, from which we 
do billing and our accreditation surveys.  

	This is Marty at home.  You know, one of the things we do is 
we allow her to work from home once a week, and she is with her 
helping dog there.  She also uses a dynavox which is a device 
that helps her communicate.  We have found that it does not 
matter how you communicate, whether you use a computer, a 
dynavox, an alphabet board, a telephone, or you sign.  It is not 
nearly so important how you accomplish it, is that you have some 
way of communicating.  We have been able to adapt to any one of 
those ways.  

	This is a young man by the name of Demetrius.  Demetrius is 
in a very large wheelchair, and he does our patient billing when 
it comes to materials supply.  

	This young man, Tim Urbman, Tim has cerebral palsy.  Tim is 
one of our ICB9 coders.  What that means is he is going through 
charts and he is doing coding which we use to then bill.  It is 
how we collect all of our revenue.  And he is one of our coders.  
You can see in this picture that he uses a key guard overlay.  
Well, that was him 12 years ago.  This is him today.  He is 12 
years older.  He no longer needs a key guard overlay.  He is 
having some difficulty with his vision, but our partners stepped 
in seamlessly and said, okay, how we can help you with a CC TV 
and make sure that we have some accommodations that helped him 
with his vision.  

	We have folks who use one-handed keyboards because they have 
had a stroke.  This young man worked at Fifth Third Bank, the 
man on the right in the green shirt, and he has severe autism.  
He had a very difficult time getting employed because he had 
some behaviors that are fairly typical for autism.  We brought 
him into our program at Fifth Third Bank because he is very good 
with a nine key, and we put him in the mortgage department where 
he entered thousands of 12-digit mortgage numbers each day.  We 
did that on a trial basis, and on the third day that he was 
doing it, he actually went to the manager and said, I entered a 
number today that I entered on Monday.  The manager kind of 
laughed at him and said, that is not possible.  We have had this 
program for years.  

   The young man continued to get a little more agitated so 
finally the manager, really just to kind of end it all, decided 
he would go back and check, and in fact, it was true.  He had 
entered a number on Wednesday that he had already entered on 
Monday, and they went back and found a huge computer glitch that 
had cost them tens of thousands of dollars they never would have 
known about.  He caught that on Wednesday and that evening he 
was offered a job.  

	This young woman has Down syndrome.  She is in a huge filing 
room at Fifth Third Bank.  It is about the size of two football 
fields.  She has to meet the same production quota which is 300 
files a day and the same accuracy quota, 98%, as any other 
employee in that department.  She is surpassing that as an 
employee.  

	I am going to stop here just a minute and say -- I know those 
are all private systems and you're probably saying, well, you 
know, we're public sector.  What I hope that you see though is 
that every one of those jobs is critical, and every one of those 
jobs has to be done and done in an exact fashion, and there is 
no room for error.  As opposed to just sitting back and saying, 
oh, our work is so important and so critical, we couldn't hire a 
person with a disability, we have learned that just the opposite 
is true.  If we have a job that is critical, if we have a job 
where we need sterling performance over and over and over again, 
we have found that it is often the case that a person with a 
disability is our best choice for that position, and the same 
goes for public sector.  

	What I want to run through next are some examples from our 
public sector programs across the country.  This as a young 
woman who has spina bifida.  She now works as a clerical 
assistant in city government.  This young man has autism.  He 
works in Miami doing document prep for scanning.  This young man 
works in Seattle, Washington on the grounds maintenance crew for 
the county parks.  

   These two men actually work in the county print shop, and 
they also work in mailing, and you can see the man on the right 
in the brown and white striped shirt.  He does not tolerate 
noise well, and that's a distraction for him so what he wears 
every day are a pair of headphones that allow him to stay 
focused and targeted while he is at work.  That is all it took. 
 
	This young man loved cars, loved everything about automobiles 
and found a job as cleaning out the buses and servicing, washing 
the buses for the Washington State Transit System.  This young 
woman with a significant developmental disability became a file 
clerk in juvenile justice.  Now, I do not know about you, but 
you do not put someone that you are worried about or that you do 
not trust into a department where you are filing files related 
to juvenile justice or any other type of filing for that matter.  
And this is where she works.  She does not make mistakes.  She 
comes to work every day and she is doing a critical job.  

   I know that we have a number of people who work in our HR 
department and I have folks all the time ask me, well, aren't 
you worried that they are going to misfile something or share 
confidential intimation? And, actually, the opposite is true.  
What I find is it is people like myself who care more about 
whether someone is on a warning or being disciplined or care, 
you know -- we want to know what someone else is making in 
comparison to ourselves.  When we have placed people in HR 
departments, we do not find that same behavior.  They are 
incredibly confidential and are not looking through files.  We 
do have folks who work in the cafe as cafe attendants out in 
Seattle, but again, we do not think everybody with a disability 
has to work there.  They work there if it is what they want to 
do.  

	This young woman works in the city finance office as an aide.  
This young man services all of the county vehicles.  She does 
the lubing and she is facilities maintenance worker.  Again, I 
talked about this a little bit.  

   Human resources, there are many jobs in human resources that 
can be capably done by people with disabilities.  We have people 
who work in mailing departments, mailing depots in very large 
institutions.  

	The man on the left in this picture is deaf.  What he does is 
he works in a system and he is there AV person and he goes 
around to all of the rooms.  He does conference set up and he 
sets up the Websites, the projectors, the computers, everything 
needed for any of their conference facility.  The young woman on 
the right serves as the main receptionist in a large public 
building.  

	I think what I have found, and what I hope you have seen, is 
that there are many, many jobs in public sector that could be 
capably filled by people with disabilities and in fact, probably 
more than capably.  They might surpass performance of some other 
people we have had employed.  The only thing that prevents this 
from happening sometimes are rules that we need to revisit and 
look at their fairness.  Perhaps the biggest barrier is actually 
low expectancy.  Mark Gold said this in 1975.  He said, "Low 
expectancy in the part of society is the single most critical 
deterrent to programs for people with severe disabilities." I 
have certainly found that to be the case.  

   What I have learned is that there is no reason for us to have 
low expectancy.  We should mirror what the public looks like.  
We should be including people with disabilities in every aspect 
of our business, especially when we are a business that works to 
serve the public.  We should have people in our midst who look 
like the people we are serving so that everybody who comes 
through the door knows that they are welcome there and that they 
are a part of who we are.  They should know that we actually 
know what is important to them, instead of a guessing about what 
is important to them.  

	I just want to end with a few of the things that we have used 
to increase public sector employment.  I think one of the things 
is we have worked on education.  We have done staff meetings.  
We have done brown bag lunches.  We have gone into department 
meetings and talked about what is it like to supervise an 
employee with a disability.  What might you have to do 
differently than you have done before? What don't you have to 
do? We have given some disability specific information.  If you 
are getting ready to hire someone with autism, what might be 
some of the things that come up? How do you manage the 
environment and the employee and the peer relationships? We do a 
lot of education.  

	There is a great video out there.  It is called "The Ten 
Commandments of Communicating with People with Disabilities." It 
costs about $200.  You can get it online, and we show that all 
the time.  It takes about 20 minutes.  We show the video.  That 
leaves us ten minutes for discussion.  It is a great ice breaker 
at staff meetings, and it changes your comfort level so that you 
can ask questions that maybe you find difficult otherwise.  We 
do lots of education for staff and training.  

	We also set up internship programs.  It is very, very common 
for government and public sector locations and hospitals and 
banks to be running training programs for all kinds of people. 
The next step beyond that, really, is just to put in place a 
training program for people with disabilities.  That is exactly 
what we did.  We allowed interns to come in and learn skills in 
a real environment where they are rarely welcome.  They rarely 
have the opportunity to learn the skills.  That is the only way 
we can change culture and teach them the skills that they can 
take out into the community.  

	We also, out West, are looking at how we might look at some 
jobs in terms of apprenticeships.  You know, there are ways for 
us to get into plant manufacturing, landscaping, electrical and 
all of those departments in public sector through an 
apprenticeship-type training.  

	The last thing I would say is that there is a group out in 
Washington called O'Neal and Associates, and I think they're 
doing the best public sector work of anybody I have seen in the 
United States.  I know my information is going to be included in 
this presentation, but if you'd ever like to speak to anyone 
from O'Neal and Associates and you want to e-mail me, I would be 
more than happy to get back to you with that information.

	I thank you very much for listening, and I hope you have a 
great day.  What I really hope is that for those of you in 
public sector, I hope that one day you have the joy in life that 
it really is to employ a person with a disability.  I thank you.  
I hope you have a great day.  Bye-bye.


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