Sheila Horowitz Cohen: the little engine that could

Sheila Horowitz Cohen was a woman of fierce determination, who was very much like the little engine that succeeds in pulling a train over a mountain in the children’s book “The Little Engine that Could.” Cohen used a can-do attitude to advocate for children and promote social justice, dedicating her life to community service. She was “a mentor to many people and perhaps above all a strong and confident leader,” said her daughter, Margie Cohen. Or, to put it another way “Sheila was a force of nature,” said B.A. Schoen, a former Baldwin school board trustee.

Cohen, a 1947 graduate of Baldwin High School and a resident of the Sterns Park section of Freeport, died on Sept. 3, at age 85.

She was born on April 15, 1930, in Brooklyn, lived in Freeport and attended Baldwin schools, where she excelled in art as well as music. She was the first chair violin in the orchestra, was also involved in Sports Night, and was song and cheer leader and mistress of ceremonies at the high school.

She married Victor Cohen in 1951, right after college, and when her children entered Brookside School, she embarked on a “50-year career in PTA,” according to Susan Aksionoff, president of the Baldwin Foundation for Education. She became the state PTA president and was named a New York State Woman of Distinction.

“She was a tenacious advocate for camp safety, seat belts in school buses, banning corporal punishment in schools, and the removal of toxic art supplies,” Aksionoff wrote in a statement. “Her efforts resulted in legislative changes that have benefited generations of children in New York state. She also mobilized thousands to send pink slips to Albany legislators, ‘firing’ them for lack of adequate school funding.”

“On the day my niece Charlene [Cohen] started kindergarten, my mom was there to see her off,” Margie Cohen recalled, “celebrating the new seat belts my mom had been instrumental in having installed on all school buses.”