Barbara Pollard

Barbara Pollard, who retired in 2002 as the English Department Chairperson at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City after teaching English for more than four decades to students on three continents, died at her home in Manhattan on Wednesday, February 2, 2022 from complications related to Covid-19. She was 85 years old.

Mrs. Pollard began her teaching career in New York City in 1958, after attending Tufts University in Massachusetts and receiving a bachelor’s degree in Literature and History and a master’s degree in Literature from New York University. In 1960 she moved her family to Australia, where she taught English and History four days a week and javelin throwing on Sports Day. She was employed as an English teacher at the Risinghill and Holland Park Schools in London five years later, before returning to the States where she taught English at Nyack High School in Rockland County and was the Assistant Dean and English teacher at James Madison High School in Brooklyn prior to joining the English Department at the High School of Music & Art in 1973 as its Assistant Chairperson. Having attended Music & Art’s sister school, the High School of Performing Arts, as a drama major, she was thrilled to be appointed Chairperson of the English Department when the two schools combined in their Lincoln Center location. She held that position for seventeen years. A nationally recognized expert in the teaching of Advanced Placement English, she enjoyed a four-year tenure as Chairperson of the National Examination Development Committee for the Advanced Placement Examination in Literature and in Composition. Upon her retirement she maintained her association with LaGuardia High School, continuing to serve on the Board of its Alumni Association for an additional decade. Mrs. Pollard spent the first fifteen years of her retirement shuttling back and forth between a flat in London and her Manhattan apartment.

Mrs. Pollard is survived by her children, Laura Masurovsky and her partner, Paul Fegelson, her son Jonathan Pollard and his wife, Karen Jason, and her five grandchildren, Alex, Adam, Jason, Benjamin, and Danielle. Services in her honor will be held at Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan on Friday, February 11, 2022. Donations in her memory can be made to Alumni & Friends of LaGuardia at https://alumniandfriends.org/give/