Beloved Miami Palmetto High teacher and TV columnist
On the day she retired after 34 years as a high school English teacher, Stephanie Loudis didn’t struggle to find the right words for what she loved most about her career.
From the 1970s, until she wrote a June 7,
2013, column for the Miami Herald on her last day at Miami Palmetto Senior High, it was all quite simple for this Kendall teacher.
“People have been asking me this week to choose the highlight of my career. My answer is always the same: seeing that look in students’ faces when they get it,” Loudis wrote.
Plenty of people — former students, her family and friends, even the general public who only knew Loudis through a freelance TV column she wrote for the Herald for some 30 years — “got” Loudis.
And when Loudis, at age 77, died of unspecified causes on April 24 while on vacation in Costa Rica, her sister Toni Loudis said, many reflected on what they got from Loudis — first at Miami High, then at Palmetto.
Nurturing. Acceptance. Education.
REMEMBERING A FAVORITE TEACHER
“It was interesting. We would be either out shopping or out at dinner and it seemed like so often somebody would call up and say, ‘Hey Miss Loudis!’ and it would be one of her former students,” Toni said.
“I even had an experience when I was working for a large insurance company down south here. A new hire came up and she saw my name, Loudis, on the cubicle and she said, ‘Are you related to Miss Loudis at Palmetto?’ And she said, ‘Oh, she was my favorite teacher. I love Miss Loudis! So I think it’s wonderful that her students all remember her so fondly.”
At Palmetto, she primarily taught 12th-grade students, her friend and former colleague Andrea Spivak said. Spivak, Palmetto’s language arts department chair, marveled at Loudis’ breadth of care for her students.
“When Race to the Top came to the forefront of education, the school had asked her if she would work with struggling readers and even ESOL [English as a second language] students. She always rose to the challenge and became an advocate for those kids who needed her most,” Spivak said.
CLASSES CAME ALIVE
“She would bring in guest speakers to kind of make the literature that she was teaching in the classroom more real,” Spivak said, recalling the time Loudis lectured from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” a 1990 collection of linked short stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War that was based on the author’s experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division.
“She would bring in Vietnam vets to talk to the students. She just knew how to bring literature to life in the classroom. And to teach those kids what mattered most,” Spivak said.
Loudis, a finalist for Miami-Dade Teacher of the Year, also loved championing individual expression.
NO STUDENT LEFT BEHIND
Loudis wanted her students to think because she believed they could.
“Many people work with machines, or numbers, or the public in general; they have a difficult time realizing how magical young people can be. Yes, challenging, silly, exasperating and obnoxious, but magical,” Loudis wrote in her retirement column. “I have worked at various jobs since I was in high school, and I like to think I did them well, but there is nothing more joyful than working with and learning from the hearts and minds of young people.”
And her mindset embraced all young people — the academically inclined and those with other skills often untapped by less sympathetic souls. Loudis
said she knew she wanted to be a teacher since she was 6 when she made her kid brother play teacher with her.
“Equally important to her was the value of students knowing how to address an envelope to fill out a job application to write a résumé, because she knew that not all the students were going to be college bound and she saw the value in the workplace for these kids,” Spivak said. “You knew the meaning of friendship if you had someone like Stephanie on your side.”
GROWING UP IN MIAMI
Stephanie Cleone Loudis, the oldest of six children, was born on April 15, 1945, in Ogden, Utah, where her father, Fred, had been stationed during World War II. He used the GI Bill to attend college and move his family to Miami, eventually buying a home with her mother, Donna, in Biscayne Gardens, her family wrote in her obituary.
Loudis was a graduate of North Miami High in 1963, then Miami Dade College and Florida Atlantic University.
“Her love of English and literature goes way back,” her sister Toni said. “I can remember when my twin sister and I were small, less than 10, and Stephanie would take us on the bus down to the big library downtown on Biscayne Bay. She really loved sharing that, too, and I think that’s part of what made her such a great teacher.
“She was 13 when my twin and I were born and she was a huge help to my mother and for all of us,” Toni added. “She really was like the second mother to both of us because she had a very nurturing personality. And even after my mom passed, she became the head of the family, really.”
THE TV COLUMN
Loudis was hired sight unseen at Miami Senior High School in the mid- to late-’70s when a secretary called and asked her if she could report to school the following day. “But, but, don’t you need to interview me?” Loudis recalled asking. The response: “Oh, my dear, there’s no time for that. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Loudis was fine. And probably hip, too, to her students thanks to her freelance TV column, “Channels,” that she wrote regularly for the Miami Herald from the early
1980s through 2011. She conducted celebrity interviews with stars like Sharon Gless of “Cagney & Lacey” fame and documented local TV news personalities.
“I have been fine because of the humor, creativity, brilliance and tenderness shown by hundreds of students over the years,” Loudis wrote in her retirement column — which was in name only because she still tutored after retiring from Palmetto, when she wasn’t traveling.
“When I came home from that first day in the classroom with a group of 10th-graders at Miami High, one of my sisters asked if I was scared. I realize now that the classroom was exactly where I was supposed to be, because I said then, surprising even myself, ‘Oh, I forgot to be scared!’ ”
SURVIVORS, SERVICE
Loudis’ survivors include her siblings Leroy “Sandy”, Lorelei, Margo and Wendi Loudis and Toni Loudis McKnight; her nieces Nelle Robb and Lauren McKnight, and great nephews Riley Hansen and Knox Landa.
A celebration of life will be at 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Coral Gables Congregational Church, 3010 De Soto Blvd. A reception will follow the service, catered by Kathy and Tung of Hy Vong.