David Lauderdale: How this Hilton Head teacher brought nature to life
.jpeg "Lois Lewis poses at a Hilton Head Island beach by a sign that was illustrated by island school students.")
Lois Lewis was quite literally a force of nature.
She was the Lowcountry’s own “Miss Frizzle,” with a magic bus full of tricks to get kids outside to sop up the pluff mud of life.
She was a middle school life science teacher for 36 years, most of it on Hilton Head Island.
But following her death on May 30 from cancer at age 73, we can see that Lois was actually a dealer in the art of discovery who gleefully battled what she saw as a growing problem of children suffering from “NDD” – Nature Deficit Disorder.
“I believe that teachers must be life-long learners,” she once said. “So I look for ways to show wonder and fascination to the kids.
“I believe that it is more important to teach our students how to learn than it is to teach them what to know. Therefore, I try to model the process and praise the search rather than worry about who arrives first.”
Angie Brown, her former neighbor in the Squiresgate neighborhood, wrote for The Island Packet years ago that the best way to know Lois’ personality was to see her classroom.
“Don’t touch me; I just ate and it was good,” warns a sign stuck to the aquarium housing Bart the red corn snake,” Brown wrote. “Bart’s home is sandwiched next to Wilbur, the hog-nosed snake. A small green turtle looking for sun sits between the two aquariums. On an adjacent wall is a collage of student bug collections featuring everyday roaches and spiders and less-well-known butterflies such as the Gulf fritillary and cloudless sulphur. A smiling paper spider hangs from the ceiling. The guinea pig cage guards the entrance to the storage room, which houses old cages, an unattached oven, shovels and wheelbarrows.”
Brown also shared what it was like to open the freezer door in the garage refrigerator at the Lewis household.
“Reaching between the lasagna and the ice cream in her freezer, Lois Lewis pulled out pig hearts, a baby copperhead and various small birds, all neatly, individually packaged, all future projects for her students.”
And she reported that when Tom Barnwell Jr. killed a 5-foot eastern diamondback rattlesnake, his wife, Susan, promptly took the snake to Lois. Lois said its severed head was as big as her fist.
“Curious youngsters from the neighborhood flocked to her outdoor picnic table where she proceeded to skin and dissect the serpent,” Brown wrote. “Each child was given a part of the rattle and alternated bringing the snake skin to school.”
Owls and kayaks
Lois is one of our most highly honored teachers, and we’ve had a lot of excellent ones.
She was Teacher of the Year three times — at both Hilton Head Island and Bluffton middle schools, and then again in 2024 in “retirement” as a part-time adult education teacher for the Beaufort County School District. Even as she finally succumbed to the pain in the last week of her life, Lois was getting emails from adults who had gotten a GED, saying, “I passed it! I passed it!”
She was honored with the 2012 Sue West Educator of the Year Award at the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce ball.
And in 2006, she was named Conservationist of the Year by the S.C. Wildlife Federation, the pinnacle of recognition for a state environmentalist. The year before, the award had gone to U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings.
She was praised for her leading role in getting students into the marsh behind the new Hilton Head Island Middle School building when it opened in the early 1990s.
She and a team of teachers that included Jane Hester, Kathy Howard, George Westerfield, Peggy Sparks, Colleen Wynn and Mary Rozek raised $80,000 and planned the 14-acre Outdoor Wetlands Laboratory (OWL; and, yes, Lois could converse with owls). It included a 90-meter boardwalk, foot path, classroom-sized observation deck, bird boxes, sampling stations and other ways for students to see the animals and how they use the wetland.
She also transformed a courtyard plot at the school from what she called a “construction wasteland” into a butterfly garden, a historic tree grove, bird sanctuary, freshwater pond and vegetable and herb garden.
Years later, she would do a similar “rain garden” to model water conservation at the new Bluffton Middle School campus.
And at Bluffton Middle, she got kids into kayaks with binoculars, notebooks and sampling bottles to experience the natural wonders of the May River.
Today, The Outside Foundation, established in 2014 on Hilton Head, gives every seventh-grader in Beaufort County the opportunity to get out on the water in its signature “Kids in Kayaks” program, originally established in 1992.
As Lois put it, “If kids get experience in the natural world, they’ll learn to love it and respect it like I do.”
Sand lake
Lois fell in love with nature as a child in Michigan. Each summer, her family vacationed in an old cottage on the shores of Sand Lake, in a region of Michigan known as the Irish Hills.
She spent every summer of her life there, weaving Sand Lake into the lives of her daughters, Jill and Julia Eidson, and former husband, Jim Eidson.
Lois got her bachelor’s degree from Kalamazoo College, and had a 4.0 in her master’s degree program at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. She would later earn national teaching certification in her field twice.
She and Jim came to Hilton Head in 1985 because they both got teaching jobs here.
Lois was known for her big smile, but that approach to life was forged through many hardships. Her mother died when Lois was a child, leaving her father, an upbeat soul who worked for the Adrian, Michigan, newspaper, to raise three girls.
One sister died of breast cancer at age 30. The other also died young, and she was deaf. Lois knew sign language and always said goodbye to loved ones — even running into the street to appear in their rearview mirror — by raising high the sign language symbol for “I love you.”
Lois lived her life wide open, and some of her prized discoveries were indoors. Once at a teachers’ convention, she saw a notice that another group there would be entertained that night by Willie Nelson. She dressed in her finest and found her way into the event, landing at a table closest to the stage.
Lois tackled cancer with the same drive to explore that she put into decades of combing Bluffton in the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count with Barry Lowes, Jane Hester and George Westerfield.
She saw constant horizons to scan at clinics and hospitals in South Carolina, Michigan and Florida. She felt like she had more to offer, her daughters said. And they distilled what she offered to them and to thousands of students.
“She was so open, and loving,” Jill said. “She always looked at people and saw the good side of them, the promise.”
Julia said, “What you saw is what you got with her. She never gave up on anybody. She would respect you. She never shut anybody off.”
Finally, a doctor in Tampa told Lois there was too much cancer in her to continue in a trial program, and he laid out her options. Jill said, “She turned to me and said, ‘I want to be in Michigan.’ ”
Lois did have one last day at Sand Lake, where as a child outside she had learned to be a force for nature.
David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@gmail.com.