by Annysa Johnson
(Copyright 2003 Journal Sentinel Inc., reprinted with permission.)
(Editor’s Note: We want to thank Jim Congdon for bringing this story to our attention via the ACB listserv. Jim, who was lucky enough to have Sister Melmarie Stoll as a teacher, said, “In this message is posted the story of one of the finest teachers of the blind I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. She was my resource teacher during my middle school years and I firmly believe that she was the one teacher that impacted my life the most. Just about all of us who were her pupils or friends thought highly of this lady and still do. Read on and find out why.”)
Sister Melmarie Stoll stands at the corner of the empty classroom and turns the pages of a photo book. The pictures span decades; still, she knows the name and life story of every child. There is Mary Ann, the musician. And Cheryl, the social worker. Randy — “He was rambunctious in those days” — works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Of course, there was Lois, though there is no photo of her. Who knew, in 1956, that she would change Stoll’s life forever?
If you listen closely, you can hear the pride in Stoll’s quiet voice — not for anything she has done, but for the accomplishments of those she’s taught at Holy Assumption School in West Allis. Their success is nothing less than she expected, of course. If there was one thing you learned in Stoll’s class, it’s that you don’t get a pass just because you’re blind.
This month, Stoll, 75, closed the door on a lifetime of teaching, most of it preparing blind children for life in the sighted world. She’d never say so herself, but she was a trailblazer, mainstreaming kids long before the term became part of the educational lexicon. She began her work at a time when the only option for many was the state school for the blind in Janesville.
Stoll, whose students call her Sister Mel, says she got so much more than she gave. Her students disagree.
“What she offered was the opportunity to be the best we could be, to really live up to our expectations,” said social worker Cheryl Orgas, who lives in Shorewood with her husband and 9-year-old son.
Said Mary Ann Koch, a retired music minister who lost her vision to a brain tumor at the age of 6: “She’ll never have any idea how much she’s really had to do with the people we’ve become.”
Entered convent at 14
Milwaukee born and raised, Elizabeth “Betty” Stoll was 14 when her parents enrolled her in the Academy of Our Lady, a high school convent in Chicago. She is a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.
At an early age, Stoll assumed her mother’s dream. “She always wanted to be a nun, but her father wasn’t Catholic, and he didn’t understand,” says Stoll. “So she asked her eighth-grade teacher what she should do. And she told her to obey her father, but to pray for vocations.”
Of her parents’ seven children, five took religious vows. “She prayed for vocations,” Stoll says with a laugh now, “just not this many.”
Stoll talks at length about her sister, Ara Coeli — it means Altar of Heaven — who spent 18 years as a missionary in Kenya before returning home in 1994, just 16 months before she died of cancer. Clearly, Stoll is awed by her sister’s sacrifice. But she’ll admit, if prodded, that you needn’t go halfway round the world to find your mission.
For 45 years, Stoll’s was in a classroom at Holy Assumption in West Allis, a few miles from her childhood home. “It just shows you how God leads you to the right thing at the right time,” she said.
Taught life skills
In many ways, the resource room for the blind at Holy Assumption looks like any other classroom in the school at 72nd and Orchard streets. Opened in 1958 with the blessing of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, the program drew students from across southeastern Wisconsin.
But instead of math and science and social studies, Stoll taught braille and typing, cane travel and other life skills students needed in the traditional classroom, where they spent most of their day. Stoll stressed music, encouraging students to play instruments and taking them to perform at charity functions and on local television shows. They went roller-skating and on field trips to the state capitol in Madison.
“I tried to show them that they could do everything anyone else could,” she said. It wasn’t a vocation she’d have even known to choose for herself.
Before Lois Nemeth arrived at Holy Assumption in 1956, “I had never even met a blind child,” Stoll says.
Born with congenital cataracts and underdeveloped eyes, Lois could see just faintly in those days, and her parents wanted her to attend their local parish school, Stoll recalled. “They asked if I could take her into my classroom. And I thought, sure, she’s just like any other child,” Stoll recalls.
A lecture in Milwaukee by a national Catholic educator made Stoll realize that there was so much more she could do. “He talked about how Catholic education had in some ways neglected handicapped children, that even if schools were crowded, if we could make a place for these children, it would be so valuable,” she said.
The school’s principal, who also attended the lecture, lobbied the parish priest, and he in turn approached the archdiocese. Stoll was sent to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., for certification, and the room opened shortly thereafter.
The program grew slowly, starting with first-graders and adding a grade each year. That it even got off the ground — and then thrived for so long — is a testament to the parents, volunteers and benefactors that have blessed it over the years, Stoll says.
Women from the Home and School League took on the meticulous task of translating texts into braille in the early years. The local Lions Club and other groups raised money for books, furniture, braille writers, computers later and sundry other needs.
One local businessman, the late Ken Cook Sr., adapted a piece of equipment so it would read braille flash cards, and had his workers make plastic trays that held the marbles the students fingered to study the complexities of braille.
Stoll credits the program’s longevity to a long list of benefactors. “There were many times when we were threatened with closing because we just didn’t have enough money,” she said.
But one former student says the credit goes to Stoll. “She drew people to her and the kids,” says Koch, who graduated from Holy Assumption in 1967 and returned as Stoll’s aide from 1977 to 1989. “If she hadn’t been the person she was, I’m not sure these people would have seen the merit.”
Firm, but kind
That “person she was” came through in the classroom as well, said Koch and others who studied with her. She could be strict but empathetic, demanding but encouraging. She set high standards and expected they’d be met. She was quick to scold students if she thought they deserved it. And she was their staunchest defender if she saw them as a victim of an injustice.
“She was human,” says Koch, who like many of the students, has maintained a friendship with Stoll over the years.
“I had to toe the line, just like everybody else,” says Randy Black, who recalls himself as a high-energy, highly curious kid who loved to ring the school bell, flush the toilets, tinker with the principal’s public address system and do just about anything else to sate his appetite for tactile stimuli. “Sister Mel was the person who made sure I had the skills I needed to succeed in life,” says Black, who runs the communications center for the bursar’s office at UW-Madison and will soon celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary.
He notes, sardonically, that one educator told his parents early on that he should be institutionalized. “Being blind is not that different from being sighted,” Black says. “Yeah, I’m blind, so what?”
It’s that confidence, that sense of place in the world, that distinguishes Stoll’s students, says Orgas. “She had very high expectations for blind kids, which is really crucial. By the time you left Sister Mel’s class, you were really ready to go on to the regular high school, where you might be the only blind student.”
As much as Stoll thrived in her work, it must have been isolating, Koch said. She recalls as a child taking statewide tests with Stoll in the resource room. “She’d have the tests all brailled up, and she’d be there with the printed books. All I can remember is all these braille writers going click, click, click. It must have driven her nuts.”
Teachers kept their doors closed in those days, but Koch recalls how Stoll once got up to open hers, just to see the children walking back and forth in the halls. “She was the only sighted person in the classroom, and I think she just needed that communication with the outside world,” she said.
If Stoll was tough on them, her former students say, it’s because she knew life would be. “She was very loving, but she made sure we weren’t being babied," says Lois Nemeth Davis, the student who launched Stoll onto working with the blind back in the 1950s. Davis retired in 1999 after working for Milwaukee County for nearly 30 years.
“She let us know early, ‘Whether you like it or not, everyone around you sees,’” says Koch. “‘To become the people you want to be, you’re going to have to live by the rules of the sighted world.’”
‘She gave us confidence’
That message served Koch well, she says, as she went on to college and into the work world. When her parents died, she moved into an apartment of her own.
“How I faced life had a lot to do with what she taught,” Koch said. “She gave us the confidence to be lawyers or musicians, even wives and husbands with children. Without her, our lives would have been totally different.”
Stoll left Holy Assumption this month when the school, its enrollment down to just 86 students, closed to merge with another. It was decided, even before the merger, that this would be the last class for the resource room, where enrollment had fallen to just three students this year.
Stoll is in Rome this week with her sister, Sister Marie Gabriel Stoll. They’re on a prayer pilgrimage with Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan.
Sister Melmarie Stoll’s trip was a parting gift from the West Allis Lions Club, which has raised tens of thousands of dollars for her classroom over the years.
In the weeks before her departure, Stoll spent hours sifting through the memories in her classroom. It was a bittersweet time as she reflected on the loss of what was and the uncertainty of what will be. She’s not retiring, she insists, only in search of a new calling.
On this day, she sits at a student’s desk, playfully quizzing a guest on the marble tray. Behind her, in large, cutout letters stretched atop the blackboard are these words: “Lord, that I may see the beauty of thy face.”
She’s seen it, she’s certain, in the faces of those who could not see her.
“This has been my life,” she says. “I loved the kids. I loved the work. I don’t think I could have wanted for a better vocation.”