As part of the 2022 Year of Willowbrook at the College of Staten Island, the Willowbrook Legacy Project will present the 29th Annual Willowbrook Memorial Lecture, entitled “Beyond Willowbrook,” on Wednesday, April 6 at 6:00pm. This signature event will be held virtually via Zoom, and focuses on what happened to residents of the Willowbrook State School after the institution closed.

Ronnie Cohn, the Independent Evaluator for the Willowbrook Class, will headline the lecture panel. Cohn was charged with ensuring that former Willowbrook residents were protected after the closure of Willowbrook in 1987. She will lead a panel discussion featuring other figures who have been instrumental in overseeing the care and conditions for the Willowbrook Class members. Other panelists include:

  • Beth Haroules, Senior Staff Attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NYCLU Plaintiffs’ lead attorney
  • Tawnie Ferguson, Executive Director, Consumer Advisory Board, Office for People With Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD)
  • Kathy Broderick, former Assistant Commissioner of the OPWDD and AHRC NYC staff member

Abiba Kindo, OPWDD (respondent)

The Willowbrook Lecture is scheduled to run from 6:00pm to 7:30pm, and will feature a Q&A among attendees and panelists. The event will be introduced by Professor Russell Rosen, the coordinator of the College’s Disability Studies minor, and facilitated by Willowbrook Legacy Project Co-Chairs Catherine Lavender and Nora Santiago.

For more than thirty years, The Willowbrook Memorial Lecture Series has provided an ongoing focus on preserving and publicizing the history of Willowbrook and its legacy in the lives of persons with IDD and other disabilities today. The lecture series was created by Professor Emeritus Dr. David Goode.

The event is free and registration is open. It will also be captured on video and will be made available through the Willowbrook YouTube channel. ASL interpretation will be available throughout.

For more information about The Year of Willowbrook, visit their Website or send email to willowbrook@csi.cuny.edu.

About Willowbrook State School and The Willowbrook Mile

Willowbrook State School was the largest institution in the world in which people with disabilities were locked away from society. In 1938, the New York State Legislature had authorized the building of a school for what they then termed “mental defectives.” The Willowbrook site was selected and the buildings erected in the early 1940s. However, when the U.S. entered the Second World War, the site was turned over to the military for use as a hospital and prisoner-of-war camp, Halloran Hospital, and operated in that capacity until 1951. As Halloran Hospital was closing down, the property returned to its original intended purpose as the Willowbrook State School. It opened in 1947, intended to serve as a model of treatment for persons with intellectual and other disabilities.

When it opened, Willowbrook attempted to provide better care in an institutional setting than could be provided at home. However, the mere scope and size of the more-than-380-acre Willowbrook State School impaired its ability to provide normal, personalized comfort and care. As conditions worsened, a group of residents’ families and staff urged change. By the 1970s, they invited reporters to share the story more widely. Media coverage and this activism led to a lawsuit resulting in a 1975 Consent Judgement ordering that Willowbrook residents receive humane treatment and adequate clinical and educational services. This also set in motion the eventual closure of Willowbrook in 1987 and began the development of community-based services. Along with the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the Willowbrook Judgement helped lead to later key legal protections, including the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

In the early 1990s, spurred by a conviction that nothing like the Willowbrook story should ever happen again, the Staten Island Developmental Disabilities Council, the primary advocacy group on Staten Island for persons with disabilities and their families, formed the Willowbrook Property Planning Committee. They began to work on collecting and preserving the history of the Willowbrook State School and to increase the visibility of the stories of those who had once lived and worked in the facility. 

In the 2010s, the Staten Island Developmental Disabilities Council partnered with the other stakeholders on the Willowbrook site: the College of Staten Island/CUNY, the Institute for Basic Research (IBR), and the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD) – to establish a memorial walking trail that has become the Willowbrook Mile. The Mile is designed to preserve the site’s history, and to create a visionary presence that commemorates the social justice and deinstitutionalization movement to ensure the rights of all persons to live with dignity and thrive in their communities.