Pasadena Unified School District board member Jennifer Hall Lee will tell the Rotary Club of Pasadena on Wednesday how her mother’s whistleblowing inside a New York institution for people with disabilities helped force its closure and reshape special education nationwide.
The noon luncheon at the University Club of Pasadena is open to the public to attend, and it brings a national civil rights story back to the district Hall Lee helps govern. The federal law that guarantees special education services in every PUSD classroom traces to the scandal she will describe.
Her topic, as the club has billed it, is “Willowbrook School, Geraldo Rivera and Why Special Ed was Never the Same Again.” Hall Lee represents District 2 on the seven-member PUSD board and lives in Altadena. She also serves on the boards of the Pasadena chapters of the United Nations Association and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Hall Lee’s mother, Elizabeth Lee, went to work as a social worker in the early 1970s at Willowbrook State School, a state institution on Staten Island, New York, for people with developmental disabilities. The facility held roughly 5,000 residents and was badly overcrowded. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, after visiting in 1965, reportedly compared conditions there to a snake pit.
While at Willowbrook, Elizabeth Lee organized parents to press for better conditions and, with others, took what she knew to the Staten Island Advance, where reporter Jane Kurtin published the first accounts...
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