Joan M. Rosner, an environmental educator who, with her late husband Hy, crafted award-winning programs for schools in Miami-Dade County, Albuquerque, N.M., and New York City, died of natural causes Sept. 17, a day shy of her 90th birthday.

Her family plans a memorial service at 1 p.m. Oct. 18 at South Miami's Unitarian Universalist Church, 7701 SW 76th Ave.

The couple moved to South Miami in 2001.

The Rosners believed that children needed to get out of the classroom to learn about the environment, so in 1992 they started CAUSE: Children Alerted to Understand and Save the Environment.

They modeled it after a program they'd created in Albuquerque, where they lived part time after retiring in the 1970s -- Joan as a New York City schools science administrator, Hy as a welfare department social worker.

In the program's first year, seven Miami-Dade elementary schools used it to teach about environmental issues like recycling and pollution.

The couple also established the Contemporary Issues in Science forum that MAST Academy holds annually. MAST's science/math department chair, Wafa Khalil, said Joan Rosner introduced her to it in the early 1990s at South Miami Middle School, where Rosner volunteered and Khalil then taught.

Students research the relationship between science and socioeconomic factors like politics, economics and ethics, then their work comes together in a daylong, student-run seminar that involves experts in various fields, Khalil explained.

She said the Rosners also helped her South Miami students explore a geological feature unavailable in South Florida: mountains.

Both Rosners ``were so passionate about their grandchildren and the future generation, and the environment.''

Rosner was born Joan Mulhern in Richmond, Va. She earned a bachelor of science degree from Douglass College, the women's affiliate of Rutgers University, and later a master's degree from Queens College.

She was doing zoology lab work on Long Island, N.Y., when World War II broke out.

Her only sibling, a brother, was killed in a noncombat incident in the wartime army, said daughter Susan Rosner Doucha of South Miami.

Joan, raised Baptist, met Hyman Rosner, an Orthodox Jew, at a square dance. She converted, ''Suzi'' Doucha said.

But later in life, said longtime family friend Ronnie Londner of Palmetto Bay, ' `Green' was their religion.''

In a memoir finished shortly before her death, Joan Rosner wrote that at first glance, ``I told myself he was the man I was going to marry. He had everything I was looking for. He was tall, well built, handsome, a dancer. . . . I walked over to welcome him and asked his name.

'It was a shock when he said `Hy.' I thought he was being flip, saying 'Hi,' and I walked away. That mistake was soon rectified.''

They shared a Greenwich Village flat before they married in 1943 -- a minor scandal for the times, Doucha said.

From 1958 to 1975, Joan Rosner was a science educator in New York, ending her career there as the city's director of elementary school science.

From then on, she and her husband divided their time among the cities where their daughters and grandchildren lived.

In 1985, the Rosners co-edited The Dade County Environmental Story, with a foreword by legendary South Florida environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and an introduction by Robert H. McCabe, then Miami-Dade College president.

In 1996, when the Rosners were honored as volunteers for the Senior Mentor for Creative Students Program, Hy Rosner said, ``When you retire, that doesn't mean you have left your brain behind. We believe in trying to make the places we stay better than how we found it when we got there.''

That year brought the first of several tragedies to Joan Rosner's life: daughter Lynn died of ovarian cancer.

Five years later -- and seven months after settling in South Miami -- Hy Rosner died.

In 2003, Doucha's daughter, Amy Doucha -- the New World School of the Arts' 1999 salutatorian -- was killed in a car wreck at age 21.

Her mother ''survived all that,'' even though she and her husband, Roger Doucha, ''were afraid it would be the end of her,'' Suzi Doucha said.

Then, in 2005, Roger Doucha died of a blood disease.

''That's when she lost her strength,'' Suzi Doucha said. ``It was so sad; she should have had this fantastically large family taking care of her, and she deserved so much better.''