MILWAUKEE Teacher was a visionary

Her former pupils disagree, but the teacher says she got more than she gave.
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
MILWAUKEE -- Sister Melmarie Stoll stands at the corner of the empty classroom and turns the pages of a photo book that 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?
Stoll taught the students at Holy Assumption School in West Allis, Wis. In June, Stoll, 75, closed the door on a lifetime of teaching, most of it preparing blind children for life in the sighted world. Stoll says she got so much more than she gave. Her former pupils 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
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."
Her background
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. For 45 years, Stoll worked in a classroom a few miles from her childhood home.
The resource room for the blind looked like any other classroom in the school. Opened in 1958 with the blessing of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, the program drew pupils from southeastern Wisconsin.
Stoll taught Braille and typing, cane travel and other life skills pupils needed in the traditional classroom, where they spent most of their day.
Stoll stressed music, encouraging pupils to play instruments and perform. 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.
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, Nemeth 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 realization
A lecture in Milwaukee by a national Catholic educator made Stoll realize that there was so much more she could do.
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.
But one former pupil 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 1977-89.
That "person she was" came through in the classroom as well, said Koch and others who studied with her.
"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?"
"She was very loving, but she made sure we weren't being babied," says Lois Nemeth Davis, the pupil 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.
"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 insists she's not retiring, only searching for a new calling.
"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."