Gloria Allen Moskowitz, ‘a legend’ in the Philadelphia School District, dies at 88

Gloria Allen Moskowitz, 88, of Ardmore, an administrator in the Philadelphia School District for more than three decades, died Tuesday, April 21, of the coronavirus at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery in East Norriton.

Mrs. Moskowitz was “a legend” in Southwest Philadelphia, where she worked her way up from secretary to coordinator of John Bartram High School Motivation Annex, said political consultant Neil Oxman, a family friend.

In the mid-1960s, she joined a team of Bartram teachers and administrators pushing to create a nurturing environment for academically promising city students who otherwise might not view college as an option.

The team succeeded in moving 350 ninth graders from the overcrowded high school to an old elementary school in the barren meadows of Southwest Philadelphia.

“I think it helps to give us a feeling of togetherness. We’re really isolated out here,” Mrs. Moskowitz told The Inquirer in April 1974. “Just 12 teachers, 350 kids, and a pack of wild dogs.”

Students were given individual attention, challenging courses, and encouragement to aim for higher education, Mrs. Moskowitz said. Most who applied to college got in.

“When we see a kid falling behind, we get right in touch with the parents,” she said. “Believe me, we’re terrible nags.”

Mrs. Moskowitz’s role in the program’s success was noticed by the Bulletin’s Claude Lewis, who once wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about her titled “Better School Produced by Nervy Women.”

“If you’ve never met Gloria Moskowitz, consider yourself lucky,” he wrote. “She’s one of those people in the Philadelphia school system who really want to help. They’re the worst kind.

“I mean they stay up all night, planning and plotting and making phone calls and just generally annoying school principals and badgering students in an effort to ‘motivate’ everybody in the world.

“Before you know it, everybody around her is pulling their hair out by the roots and Gloria Moskowitz winds up with what she wants.”

Her son, Mark, said choosing the students for the program took all summer. “It was like casting for a film,” he said. “Once she decided, she would not give up on a kid.”

Patricia Somers, who graduated from Bartram Motivation in 1970 and later earned a master’s degree in nursing, said the school’s formula worked.

“The school showed us a culture we never knew existed, and gave kids on the edge a shot at a better world,” she said. “Because of the Motivation Program, I experienced the Academy of Music, I met Pearl Buck and Pearl Bailey — me, a poor kid from Southwest Philly.”

Mrs. Moskowitz was born in the western Pennsylvania steel town of Sharon, where her family owned a children’s clothing store. Her grandmother had emigrated from Lithuania.

She graduated from Beaver College in 1953. She met Jerome W. Moskowitz and married him. The couple settled in Wynnefield and had two children. They moved to Penn Valley and then Ardmore.

Mrs. Moskowitz joined the Motivation Program while her children were young, and at the same time earned a master’s degree in education from Villanova University. After her retirement from the Philadelphia School District in the 1990s, she had a second career at Philadelphia Futures, matching adult mentors and students.

She left that job to care for her ill husband. After he died in 2000, she bought a computer, learned how to create an online business, and, at age 73, joined with a friend to provide long-term rentals of upscale apartments in Paris and Tuscany.

For the next decade, “before anyone thought" of Airbnb, she went back and forth across the Atlantic to check out the rentals, her son said.

At the time of her death, she was a resident of Shannondell, a senior community in Audubon, Montgomery County.

Besides her son, she is survived by a daughter, Susan Goldman, and five grandchildren.

Services are private. Plans for a public memorial were pending.