Award presented in memory of Dr. Corrine Russell Donley for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of ABA in Wisconsin on Saturday, October 5, 2024.
Good morning everyone,
I am really pleased to be here and very proud, of course, to accept this award from the Wisconsin Association for Behavior Analysis on behalf of my late mother, Dr. Corrine Russell Donley.
I first wanted to say that I am here this morning with my beautiful wife Sally and my wonderful granddaughter Aliyah. We arrived from Michigan late last night and we are pleased to join you this morning and be a part of this program.
We are here actually also to represent the extended Donley family. My mom was a mother, grand mother, great grand mother and great-great grand mother, so we have a very large family.
Some of you in attendance today may have known her and I would suspect, after 20 years of this organization, that perhaps many of you did not have a chance to meet her.
So, I wanted to say a few words about the person you would have referred to as Corrine or Dr. Donley. She always insisted upon being referred to professionally as Dr. Donley. She was very proud of her academic accomplishments.
I just want to say her life contains many, many lessons for all of us regardless of what field you work in or what profession you have pursued.
Before arriving here in Wisconsin in the 1990s, she worked for 25 years in the public school system in New Jersey, which is where my three siblings and I were raised. She was a special education teacher in the Howell school district.
She was a pioneer in that field in bringing the students who had special needs into the school environment and allowing all of the other students to interact with them. She had a special classroom with all of the appliances of a standard kitchen and also a washing machine. She taught life skills to a broad range of ages of children and they would go shopping and so forth.
I had the opportunity on several occasions to go to school with her and I met many of these students and became familiar with what it was like to be around people with special needs.
As Megan Sellers was explaining, from her earliest days my mother developed a love for music. She was an accomplished pianist. She played violin in The Ohio State University symphony and it was there that she met my dad, Loren Donley.
Now, after she finished and retired from the public schools in New Jersey at the age of 50, she decided to pursue a higher degree and received two masters and then her doctorate at Columbia. It was after this that she relocated here to Wisconsin to work at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
I would say throughout her life, whatever she was doing, she was always thinking of others and helping those in need. This took many forms, I cannot really go into it, I now receive all of her mail [laughter] and there were many, many organizations that she donated to and supported.
As I said, as I was growing up, I had many opportunities to both meet the students that she worked with and also the families and I saw the impact of her efforts on those families, which were life changing.
No matter what the difficulties were, no matter what the challenges, she was determined and always sought to find solutions, even if they were the smallest things, as you know, like learning how to speak. It was through those accomplishments that she found success in her professional work.
I also want to mention that she said to me many times later on that if she had learned about Applied Behavior Analysis earlier she would have raised us quite differently. There were many spankings, [laughter] I will say that and I do not think that this would have been done if she had known back then what she learned later on.
She passed a deep sense of social responsibility onto all of her children. I believe that if this world today were run by people like my mom and all of you, that we would have a society which would be much more equal.
So, from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the Donley family, I want to thank you for keeping the memory of my mother alive and presenting us with this award today.
Thank you very much.
MULTIMEDIAMAN 