Herbert J. Hoover Middle School students were in a state of shock last week after popular teacher Aimee Greenberg Phillips, 40, died suddenly from an undiagnosed brain tumor.
Phillips taught eighth-grade English, chaired the yearbook committee and coached cheer, track and dance. Students described her as funny, inspirational and caring. “She was the teacher everyone always wanted and wished they got,” said Savannah Smith. “If any of the students needed to talk to someone, she would always be the person they would go to,” said Olivia Gaffney. Her classroom door is locked for now and covered with flowers and notes from Hoover students and staff.
Meanwhile, Phillips’ loved ones have been dressed in purple, using purple pens and wearing purple ribbons, and sporting dragonflies in various forms, in her memory.
“Aimee’s favorite color is purple,” her sister Stacey Greenberg said, adding that dragonflies also came to signify a good omen to Aimee. “When my father passed in 2004, my sister had many dragonflies around her and we took it as a sign my dad is OK. She then picked the dragonfly theme when decorating her daughter’s room. For her baby shower, the theme was dragonflies with lavender and silver-gray.”
Phillips, a Satellite Beach resident, left behind her husband Branden Phillips, a firefighter for the City of Melbourne, and their infant daughter Charlotte, just 1 year old.
More than 200 people showed up for a Friday evening celebration of Phillips’ life at Pelican Beach House in Satellite Beach. Her friends and family dressed in purple and spent the bittersweet evening sharing their fondest memories and expressing their disbelief that her life was over so quickly.
Mackenzie Quirarte, a high school friend, set up a table with stones that people could paint with special messages for the family. “My plan is to place them in our back yard and when she (Charlotte) is older she can read how important her mother was to all of us,” Brandon wrote on Phillips’ memorial page.
Scrapbooking was one of Phillips’ passions, so her sister Stacey is putting together a memory book, asking for loved ones to submit written recollections on the Aimee Greenberg Phillips Memorial Facebook page by June 18 to be included in the book. Friends also set up a Go Fund Me Page to help with raising Charlotte.
Born in Orlando to Donald Greenberg, a veteran of both the U.S. Air Force and the Navy, and Loretta Greenberg, Phillips moved with her family to Satellite Beach in 1991. She graduated from Satellite High School and went on to earn a degree in organizational management from Rollins College. Throughout college, Phillips served as a clerk in the human resources department for the 920th Rescue Squadron at Patrick Air Force Base.
Aimee married Branden Phillips on Valentine’s Day 2004, and after 10 years of trying to start a family, they finally welcomed Charlotte in 2016 – a dream come true.
Though Phillips had only been with Brevard Schools since 2013, and taught at Melbourne High School before coming to Hoover, she bonded with the entire beachside school community. Countless friends and colleagues remember her as a person with an ever-present smile whose sense of fun was contagious.
Complaining of a headache, Phillips went to Urgent Care on May 5. Later that night, she passed out. Her husband worked to revive her until the ambulance rushed arrived and rushed her to the hospital – but a CT scan showed a blockage in her brain and it was, tragically, too late.
Aimee Greenberg Phillips was an organ donor and her death reportedly provided a new life for four very sick people on transplant waiting lists. Her heart was donated for medical research.
As the Hoover family and the community begin to heal from their stunning loss, Branden told friends on his social media, appropriately in purple letters – “Feeling peaceful – I got my dragonfly today.”
