When Jan Schmitt’s sister set up a GoFundMe to cover burial expenses for her oldest child, her husband Douglas objected, saying paying for her funeral was their burden to bear as parents.

Schmitt told him she’d tell her sister to take it down, but didn’t immediately contact her. The next day, Douglas said he knew the account still was active and suggested using the donations to establish a foundation in their daughter’s name instead.

“We’re standing in the back yard, crying, and I thought that was the most beautiful idea anybody had ever given me,” said Schmitt.

Lex’s Learning Foundation became a reality.

Who was Alexandra?

Alexandra Corrin Schmitt died on Oct. 7, four days after she was injured in a wreck on La. Highway 28 East near the family’s home. She was 25.

She had been studying to become a teacher while working as a paraprofessional in Rapides Parish schools — first at Bolton, where mom Jan is assistant principal, and later at Rosenthal Montessori Elementary School.

As a child, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, Schmitt said in her remarks at her daughter’s Oct. 10 funeral. The condition became part of the autism spectrum disorder in 2013, and Alexandra would call herself neurodivergent, she said.

Schmitt said her daughter needed a lot of support when she was younger, but blossomed once she reached high school.

“… she found her niche. She found her group. She went with it, had friends,” she said. “Everything was great. She made great grades.”

Like a lot of Buckeye High School classmates, she wanted to go away to college. She got a scholarship and TOPS and moved to Monroe to attend school while living with an aunt.

But she ran into trouble.

“She ran into the same trap that everybody else falls into when they go off and go to college, only she didn’t have the executive function to begin with so she fell a lot harder,” said Schmitt.

It took a few years to get on her feet again. She worked some odd jobs before starting at Bolton as a paraprofessional.

She also left her parents’ home at 23, moving in with an older man. It wasn’t a move her family approved of, but Schmitt said Alexandra again was eager to emulate her peers who, by now, were getting married, having kids and buying their own homes.

Alexandra thought she wasn’t a success as long as she lived with her parents.

The relationship ended abruptly after two years when Alexandra discovered the man allegedly was abusing a child. She told the girl’s mother and moved back in with her parents.

Schmitt said Alexandra told her and Douglas that she needed three years to become a teacher and asked if she could live with them. They readily agreed, saying after that situation “we never wanted her to leave again.”

The wreck, and saying goodbye

Alexandra wanted to be independent, even as she lived with her parents. She told them she could manage getting ready for work without any help.

On the day of the wreck, she was running late — not too late for work, but enough so that she forgot to take her medication before rushing out. Once she finished her lunch duties at Rosenthal, she decided to drive home to get it.

Schmitt says her daughter had to take her medicine by 4 p.m. if she was going to be able to continue working and do her own online work toward her degree.

But as Alexandra pulled onto La. 28 East, she didn’t see the 18-wheeler gravel truck approaching her. It hit the driver’s side without slowing, and Schmitt soon got a call from Louisiana State Police that her daughter being taken to Rapides Regional Medical Center in serious condition.

Schmitt was confused as to why her daughter was home when she should be working. It would be days before the family pieced together what had happened.

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She soon was led into a trauma room to see her daughter.

“There’s my baby, sedated and intubated. And she looks perfect. She looks perfect,” said Schmitt, who noted just a mark on her left arm from her seat belt and bandages on her head.

“There’s nothing mangled. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

She said her daughter’s face was “smooth, beautiful,” and an orthopedic doctor briefed her about damage to her pelvis that would keep her off her feet for about six weeks. But the doctor said she’d be able to walk again.

“Given what I heard, my baby’s gonna be fine. Right?”

Alexandra was taken into surgery so a neurosurgeon could place drains to relieve pressure on her brain. Even then, Schmitt still thought her daughter would be OK. She visited the waiting room during the surgery to talk to people, thank them for coming, hug them.

But once Alexandra was placed into intensive care, the neurosurgeon had grim news.

The doctor said Alexandra would have to be sedated for several days and, if she lived, likely would have no quality of life. The family struggled to make sense of it.

“I’m like, I don’t know what that means,” said Schmitt. “My standard of living is that my daughter experiences joy, so if you tell me that there’s a chance that she will ever experience joy again in her life, we’re keeping this going as long as we can.”

The doctor said they’d give her time but, by Friday morning, Alexandra wasn’t improving. Schmitt asked for a CT scan, which showed parts of her brain and brain stem were dying.

The family contacted the Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency, and they were told that Alexandra had updated her registration just a week before her February birthday to donate all her organs.

“So that made our decision very easy,” said Schmitt. “We knew what she wanted.”

The next day, Alexandra was taken off life support to see if she could breathe on her own. It took her 130 seconds — just more than two minutes — to take a breath.

“We said our goodbyes that night,” said Schmitt. “She managed to hold on to her life for 21 minutes and passed at 10:05.”

The family scheduled an Honor Walk for Alexandra, so people could line the hallways of the hospital to show their respect as she was taken to her organ procurement procedure. Schmitt says she broke down when she saw Bolton teachers and students in their homecoming attire among those who gathered.

“Who does that? She was just a 25-year-old para at their school. Who does that?” she cried. “These kids at Bolton do that. Who pushes back a whole homecoming dance for somebody who used to work at this school? This school does that. These teachers and this staff and these students. They’re so wonderful here.”

Alexandra donated both her organs and tissues. Her ovaries were donated to infertility researchers, while her spinal cord was donated to researchers working toward a non-addictive painkiller. She intended to donate her brain for autism research, but it was too damaged, said her mom.

Schmitt said God gave her grace at Alexandra’s funeral so she could eulogize her daughter, for which she’ll be “forever grateful.”

And, as it turned out, Alexandra had touched someone so much that they paid for her funeral.

“We were blessed, and her funeral expenses were covered, fully, because God … because … I have no answers,” said Schmitt. “She saved a little girl’s life and came home to us for two months. She went on a camping trip with her daddy and had long heart-to-heart conversations that weekend and talked about how much she loved us and appreciated us and gave him that peace.”

She cried when the young man who drove the truck that hit Alexandra talked with her at the funeral. She said, in the tight-knit Buckeye community, everyone knew who had been involved in the crash, but it took her some time to catch up.

Schmitt said she had prayed for the man every day since the crash “because I couldn’t imagine the pain that he’s going through, the emotional guilt, grief that is associated with that even though she was at fault.

“God had to be there. God wanted her to be an organ donor. God wanted him to live.”

She hasn’t seen video of the wreck, captured by a surveillance camera at a business across the highway, but wants to so she can ease her mind.

She said it’s “because the image in my head that I see every time I close my eyes is … I’ve got to get that out because I’m seeing a slow-motion movie of everything, even though I wasn’t there. But I know, and I see it. I saw the car. I saw her. I know what happened. I need to see it to put it behind me.”

Schmitt said her first instinct is to say autism killed her daughter, but she knows that’s not fair.

“I don’t know. It just happened. It was just an accident,” she said. “It was just an accident, and nobody’s at fault, and all the what-ifs? I’ve gone through them all. I’ve gotten mad at so many different people and so many different things for everything that’s happened in the past that led up to this.”

But Schmitt said all that’s left to do is honor Alexandra and carry on.

The foundation’s purpose

It was easy for Alexandra to become obsessed with things, said Schmitt. For her, it was science, nature and the beauty of life. She would collect things from nature and make necklaces and crowns from flowers.

And she knew elementary school students needed more hands-on activities related to that.

Schmitt said she asked Alexandra’s classroom teacher and principal at Rosenthal what they might need for that, and they talked about getting a butterfly garden. But Schmitt already has one for them, so she told them to think of something else.

She already has lots of ideas and thinks of more each day, so much so that her husband told her to slow down. He said he thought the foundation would dole out money a few times a year.

“I can’t. This is more than that for me,” she said. “This is my only way to hold on to her.”

So she thinks about buying weather stations for elementary schools, having fundraisers so kids can have nature paths to walk, touch, identify things, get barefoot in the grass, lay down and look up at trees just like Alexandra did.

Lex’s Learning Foundation now is registered with the Internal Revenue Service and the state. A bank account has been opened at Red River Bank.

People can make donations either to the GoFundMe or to the bank account. Schmitt has registered a domain for the foundation, but needs someone to build the website.

A Bolton teacher designed the foundation’s logo, and Schmitt said it captures her daughter.

“I love that. We all love that. It’s her, it’s her color, it’s her quirk, it’s her everything.”

Alexandra didn’t have a lot of friends and had a lot of struggles, but Schmitt said she smiled every day and tried to make those around her feel better. She said her daughter lived in her head a lot, but she also was funny, quirky and beautiful.

She said the foundation is intended to last for what could have been Alexandra’s lifetime.

“All those years that she’s not teaching, and she’s not out exploring nature, I want this foundation to give that opportunity to little kids,” said Schmitt.

She said elementary school teachers will be able to fill out an application that will be on the website eventually. Proposals will have to have their principals’ approval, but she intends to keep it free of strings and red tape that other grants can require.

In return, Schmitt asks for just one thing.

“I don’t care about any data. I just want pictures. I just want to see the kids.”

She’ll take them herself if she needs to, or teachers can send them to her.

“It’s for me. I’m not gonna lie,” she said. “It’s for me, so I can see her spirit carrying on because it’s so important to me that her spirit does not die.”

Schmitt is determined to fund it, even if she has to organize events. She said her family isn’t rich, “but we can do something for this community and these kids.”

Still, she acknowledges she doesn’t have full focus now. Her grief and that of her family, including a younger son and daughter, is raw, but she hopes it all comes back.

“Baby steps, but we’ll get there,” she said.

To do that, she’ll need the community’s help. She rattled off other ideas she’s had, including providing some families with Friends of the Alexandria Zoo memberships, but reiterated she wants ideas to come from teachers and for students to have fun as they learn.

“I just want to see them smiling like she smiled, listen to laughing like she laughed when she got to get her hands in the dirt.”