Saturday, August 8, 2026

PUSD Trustee to Tell Rotary How Her Mother’s Whistleblowing Closed Willowbrook

Jennifer Hall Lee [Courtesy photo]

Jennifer Hall Lee traces a 1972 television exposé to the special education law that followed, and Wednesday’s luncheon is open to the public to attend

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 in late 1971. Lee was fired in early 1972, along with a Willowbrook physician, Dr. Michael Wilkins.

Wilkins then called a young WABC-TV reporter, Geraldo Rivera.

Rivera got inside with a camera. His report, “Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace,” aired Feb. 2, 1972, and won a Peabody Award. He described roughly one attendant for every 50 children, many of them unclothed, and told viewers the ward smelled of filth, disease and death. Willowbrook closed in 1987. Its former grounds are now part of the College of Staten Island.

Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, guaranteeing children with disabilities a free appropriate public education. The law was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990.

Hall Lee’s grandmother, Lillian Hall, whose youngest child had Down syndrome, campaigned on Staten Island for group residences rather than institutions. Their work led to deinstitutionalization and the beginning of independent living for people with disabilities in the United States, according to the club’s program announcement.

Hall Lee has said she is part of a group working to secure full federal funding of the special education law. Washington committed to covering 40% of the average per-student cost of special education when the act was passed and has provided less than half that share, according to the National Council on Disability.

Before her election to the board, Hall Lee worked in film. She began in the camera department at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic, and her credits include “Back to the Future II,” “Hook,” “Ghost,” “Death Becomes Her,” “The Mask” and “Forrest Gump,” the program announcement said. She later worked in visual effects at Warner Bros., Sony and Technicolor, and has belonged to two unions, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the film editors’ Local 700.

She is also a filmmaker and writer whose work centers on human rights. Her work with feminists in Pakistan began when she traveled to Islamabad to screen her independent documentary “Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation” at the Critical Thinking Forum at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Her work with feminist women in Pakistan has since grown and includes a Fulbright award. Her most recent international exhibit, “Women Without Borders: A Visual Study of Women’s Lives in Pakistan,” was shown at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts and Pasadena City College.

The meeting begins at 12 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 12, at the University Club of Pasadena, 175 N. Oakland Ave., Pasadena 91101. Club President Tammy Silver is hosting. Non-members are welcome, and the $45 cost includes lunch. RSVPs are due by 5 p.m. Monday. The meeting is also on Zoom.

Overflow parking is across the street behind Pasadena Heritage, entering from Madison Avenue, where parking in reserved spaces is permitted. Additional parking is at 221 N. El Molino Ave., at the northwest corner of El Molino and Walnut, for $1 per two hours and a two-block walk. Information: Rotary Club of Pasadena, 626-683-8243, or pasadenarotary.com.