Fort Worth, Texas
Beverly Moerbe, a native Texan, received her bachelor’s degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas. She later earned a master’s from the University of North Texas and completed additional post-graduate work.
Not long before her induction into the Hall of Fame, she retired after teaching for forty-two years, twenty-six of them at Boswell High School, Fort Worth, Texas, where she was director of Thespian Troupe 1373.
Ms. Moerbe served as a director on the EdTA Governing Board from 1997-2000 and later as a leadership coach for EdTA. She hosted and conducted one-act play festivals for high schools for over twenty-five years and mentored new and inexperienced teachers. She was an adjudicator and contest manager for Texas’s University Interscholastic League’s one-act play competition.
She created a theatre curriculum consisting of four theatre courses and two technical theatre courses for the Texas Education Agency and Texas Educational Theatre Association. She also created curriculum in theatre, technical theatre, and speech communications for her local school district.
Ms. Moerbe stressed the importance of charitable giving, by example, to her students. Beneficiaries included a New York fire company after 9/11, AIDS care programs, and U.S. troops in Iraq. Throughout her teaching tenure, the entire proceeds of one performance of the theatre department’s annual musical production were earmarked for a charity. Her troupe once “adopted” a two-year-old HIV-positive orphan named Chastity and raised over $15,000 to help pay the girl’s expenses.
Ms. Moerbe has been recognized with numerous honors, including being named Secondary Theatre Educator of the Year by the Texas Educational Theatre Association. She also received the Alma Slawinski Award from Texas Thespians, and was named Outstanding Teacher by the Texas Association of Curriculum and Supervision.
Ms. Moerbe summarized her approach: “In my forty-two-year teaching career, theatre was the tool I used to help students not necessarily ‘find themselves,’ but to create themselves, to discover the wonder of who they are and how they fit into the universe, to become more than they ever thought they could be, to love, to work, to aspire, to dream—to be.”
