Anyone who thinks it is impossible to find a job needs to meet Jamie Davis.

        He's 30 now, about to celebrate one year on his first job, withwell-founded aspirations of moving up in his company. It took 7 1/2 years to earn his bachelor's degree in marketing communications from Wright State University — not for want of ambition or ability, but because of changing majors midstream and a few other life interruptions. Once he graduated, it was another two years before he found an employer willing to take a chance on a guy with a disability.

        And when Cintas hired Mr. Davis, it wasn't the first time the company had looked past a disability and into the pool of human potential.

        “We don't think of people working here as being disabled or not,” said Belinda Snell, Cintas Marketing Call Center manager. “We don't walk up and down the aisles and count them. We had a birthday lunch yesterday, and if you looked around the room, there was just a group of co-workers laughing, cutting up, having a good time. There might be a wheelchair here, a scooter there, a person with an invisible disability, a person with no disability. They're just Jamie or Linda or Brian or Ed.”

        That's the way the 15 to 20 workers out of 60 in the call center feel, too. And that's why the Inclusion Network, at their seventh annual awards dinner in January, honored Cintas with it Workplace Inclusion Award.

No isolation

        “I had driven the same school bus for 16 years when I had my stroke,” recalls Linda Wilke, who was hired by Cintas more than four years ago. After speech therapy and rehabilitation, Ms. Wilke regained physical independence with a motorized scooter, a wheelchair-lift-equipped van and a focus on doing everything with her right hand that wasn't possible with her now paralyzed left.

        “No one is isolated or segregated here,” Linda says of her work environment. “I'm considered as good as anyone else. I have a job I like, and I think I do it well.”

        Cintas management obviously thinks so, too. Ms. Wilke went from part-time to full-time in a fairly short time and is considered a tenacious saleswoman. Accommodations for her as for other employees in the company have been mostly inexpensive and tantamount to courtesy.

        The thumb latch was removed from one door to render it operable by someone with a scooter and one hand. The pressure on restroom doors was lessened to render them friendlier to a push from someone using a wheelchair. An adapted keyboard, a roller ball mouse, an ergonomically friendly chair — those are the sort of accommodations you could find, if you look hard for them, but they are overshadowed by camaraderie and hard work.

        Jamie Davis was the first visually impaired person the company hired, but he probably won't be the last. He memorized scripts from Braille and has screen-reading software that reads his computer screen aloud. Cintas took a chance on him, but his own leap of faith was impressive, too.

Transportation a problem

        Leaving a support network of family and friends in Dayton, Mr. Davis relocated to Cincinnati, willing to do whatever was necessary to make the job work. Transportation proved to be the hardest part of his new job.

        Initially, he used taxis to travel from his West Chester Township apartment to the Mason call center. “But the cabs were never on time,” Ms. Snell recalls. “He would arrive in a panic that he was going to be fired.”

        “I've wanted to be employed for a long time,” he says simply. “It was my turn to do my part to make sure that it fits.”

        He had joined St. John's Church where he now cantors and sings in the choir. Placing an ad in his church bulletin netted first one and ultimately six volunteer drivers. He orchestrates the weekly schedule, printing copies for them as well, and no longer fears being late.

        And if transportation should occasionally fail? Well, “One of us will once in a while pick him up or run him home,” Ms. Snell says.

        In other words, he's a valued employee. Cintas has demonstrated that focus on ability is a win-win situation — exemplifying a model of inclusion that would benefit businesses everywhere.

       Contact Deborah Kendrick by phone: 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net.
       

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