Hospitalized with COVID-19, teacher offered to keep teaching
Hussli planned to utilize Zoom, but worsened and died Thursday
HOWARD - Even after a diagnosis of COVID-19, Heidi Hussli didn’t plan to give up teaching.
After being hospitalized last week, she told a friend she planned to teach via video the week of Sept. 14-18. Hussli, who’d most recently taught in-person on Sept. 8, “said she would Zoom with her kids from the hospital,” the friend said via text message.
But “by Sunday, her condition worsened.”
Hussli, who’d taught German for 16 years at Bay Port High School, was unable to teach again. She died Thursday morning at a Green Bay hospital.
Family members, in a statement distributed by the Howard-Suamico School District, said the 47-year-old mother of one had recently tested positive for
COVID-19.
It’s not known when Hussli, of Suamico, was infected with the coronavirus.
She’d taught classes in person Sept. 1, 2 and 8.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that between two days and two weeks can pass between the time somebody is first exposed to the coronavirus and the time they show symptoms of COVID-19, the disease it causes. Typically, it’s about five days.
People can spread the virus for about two days before they show symptoms, the CDC says.
Hussli followed social-distancing protocols and wore a face mask while teaching, district communications director Brian Nicol said.
Hussli taught two International Baccalaureate classes, each of which had 15 to 20 students enrolled, the district said. Because Bay Port has split its student body into groups that attend on opposite days, the classes would have 7 to 12 students attending in person. The remainder watched via a video feed.
She had not been in the classroom since being diagnosed and had “no close contact” with students after learning she was infected with COVID-19, district officials said.
The Howard-Suamico School District serves about 6,100 students across Brown County. It opened at the beginning of September with students attending school in a mixture of in-person and online classes.
The district’s Thursday statement said Hussli recently tested positive for COVID-19 and didn’t mention other medical conditions. A formal cause of death has not been issued.
Howard-Suamico School Board members wouldn’t discuss Hussli’s death. Board member Jason Potts declined an interview request; others did not return phone calls.
‘Frau loved us students’
Former students, though, rushed to share tributes on social media and elsewhere.
As German teachers often do, Hussli had students refer to her as “Frau.”
Emily Ross, who graduated from Bay Port in 2015 and is now a special education teacher at a high school in Minnesota, said she set her sights on becoming an educator in large part because she had teachers like Hussli.
“She’s definitely one of the teachers who stands out the most to me,” said Ross, who took German for three years. “Her ability to reach kids made me realize that, as a teacher, your power to impact students is limitless. I think about that every day in my classroom.”
It was in that classroom that Ross learned of Hussli’s death Thursday.
“I’m in my second year as a teacher and I still think about the way she’d light up the second any student walked into the classroom — you always knew you belonged,” Ross said. “That’s something I’ll always try to imitate in my classroom.”
Bay Port’s German program was small and tight-knit, and everyone knew “Frau,” said Lea Kopke, a 2018 graduate.
Kopke said she spent nearly every school lunch during her senior year hanging out in Hussli’s classroom — and not just with other German students, but also those who were studying Spanish and French.
Many Bay Port teachers would spend their lunch hour in their lounge. Hussli stayed back in her classroom to hang out with the students.
“People were just drawn to her. She definitely touched every soul she met in a positive way,” Erin Froelich, a 2016 graduate, said.
Former students recalled how Hussli often arrived at school “bright and early” each morning, and was among the last to leave at night. She also made herself available to students on weekends before big projects were due, and sometimes even opened the school building for them to work there.
“I always describe her as the kindest heart that I ever knew,” Froelich said, choking up as she spoke.
She also took groups of students on trips to Germany after the school year was over through the German American Partnership Program, a high school student exchange program.
Froelich said Hussli ensured her students saw and experienced everything she felt they needed to in Germany. And, she recalled with a laugh, she made sure to document all the moments with her camera on a selfie stick.
“It was embarrassing at the time and we were like laughing at it and stuff because we were in high school, I’m just so grateful now that we got all those great photos,” she said.
Hussli kept in touch with many of her students, no matter how many years had gone by since they’d graduated from Bay Port.
Ryan Ring, a 2015 Bay Port graduate who had Hussli as a teacher for four years, stayed in touch with her after he’d moved on to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
During his first year there, he tested into a sophomore-level German course. When he struggled to learn the language’s notoriously difficult grammar, Hussli helped him through.
Even after Ring stopped taking German classes, they stayed in contact regularly, discussing news out of Germany and updating each other on what they were up to.
“That was the kind of person she was — she always wanted to know what her former German students were up to, whether it was related to the German language or culture or not,” Ring said. “She’s one of a kind.”
On Wednesday, Ring texted her to tell her he’d been listening to German podcasts all day because he missed her class and learning about the German language and culture.
Ring never received a response. The next day, he heard the news of her death.
“I didn’t even know she was in the hospital. It was so shocking,” he said.
And, several former students said, she believed in each and every one of her students, no matter who they were.
While spending two weeks with a local family in Germany, Hussli introduced Froelich as one of her best students who spoke German very well.
“She had a lot more faith in my German speaking ability than I did,” Froelich recalled, laughing. “She was her students’ greatest advocate. Even if you didn’t have faith in yourself, she had it for you.”
Today, Ring knows he’s not the only student who Hussli profoundly affected.
“She was just one of those people who truly loved to teach and loved what she did,” Ring said. “She would probably tell you today, if she was here, it wasn’t just work for her. It was truly something she loved to do. Every student at Bay Port who took class with her felt that and I think that’s what made her so impactful.”
Annysa Johnson of the Journal Sentinel contributed to this story.