Page 33 - ABILITY Magazine - Best Practices Employment

When you stop by Walgreens to pick up a prescription or a few toiletry items, you don’t see what’s going on beyond the shelves, beyond the brick and mortar. What you don’t see is that the corporation has been busy at work creating distribution centers that employ impressive numbers of people with disabilities. Chet Cooper, ABILITY Magazine’s editor-in-chief, recently spoke with Walgreen’s Randy Lewis, the senior vice president of distribution and logistics, who detailed how his company is tapping into a new talent pool.
CC: Whose idea was it to expand your outreach?
RL: My son, Austin, has autism. He’s 19. He’s been in the school system since he was three. So he’s gone to two different schools a year for the last 16 years, which means 32 different Individual Education Plans (IEP) that have been developed for him. Every IEP is the same. You get there. You wait. You go in. You laugh. You cry. You come out. There’s another set of parents waiting.
I’ve been in his classes and I’ve seen all these kids with all kinds of disabilities, whether it be Cerebral Palsy or mental retardation or autism—mostly cognitive disabilities—and I’ve noticed when these kids get out of school, they have to com- pete with a group that’s much better prepared than they are. I’ve come to the con- clusion that the disabled die a death of a thousand cuts. They probably don’t drive.