Teacher also serves as principal at Sonrise Christian School

Editor’s note: Due to a production error, the first four paragraphs of this story were repeated in last week’s story. Here is the story in its correct form.

Peggy Miller did not expect to become the administrator (principal) of Sonrise Christian School in Sisters. For that matter, she never expected to teach there. She has learned that many good things “happen by accident.”

Miller has been a fifth-grade teacher at Sonrise for the past four years. Early this year, the school and Sisters School District mutually decided to suspend a program under which the district had been paying parts of the salaries of several Sonrise teachers for instruction in secular subjects.

That put a $130,000 hole in the 2004-05 Sonrise budget, which forced several budget-cutting measures. Administrator Buzzy Castonguay, who had just come aboard last September, volutarily stepped down from his post to help the district deal with its financial situation.

Since Miller was already on the teaching staff and was part-way through an administrative licensure program at the University of Oregon, the school’s board asked her to take over on an interim basis. She was glad to do so, and now spends three-fourths of her time on administrative duties while still teaching two hours a day.

This arrangement will be expanded next year, when Miller will spend all of her time as administrator but at less than a full salary since she won’t yet have her administrative credential. If she receives a credential by the end of the year, she might become a candidate for the position on a permanent basis.

Miller grew up in Santa Cruz, California, but as soon as she graduated from high school in 1980 she and her father moved to Central Oregon, which he had always loved because of the outdoor lifestyle — mainly fishing. She attended Central Oregon Community College and eventually Western Oregon State University, obtaining a degree in elementaryeducation.

After a couple years “subbing all over Central Oregon,” she took full-time teaching job in Prineville. That’s where she spent the next 16 years, teaching for a while, taking time off to have two children, then going back to teaching. Her career included several years as an Intel master teacher, training colleagues in the use of new technology in the classroom.

Eventually, she and her husband, Tim, decided they’d like to move to southern Oregon, partly to be closer to her father, who had retired to Brookings.

They were in the midst of carrying out those plans when Peggy saw an ad for a teaching position at Sonrise.

Out of curiosity, she inquired, was interviewed and got the job.

“I was thinking, I don’t want to commute this far. But then I met Dan Cole (former administrator) and the board and I walked out of that interview thinking, ‘I want to work for these people. I love their vision. Their commitment to excellence is astounding.’”

She planned to work for only a year but soon decided to stay. So the Millers shifted gears and moved to Redmond, leaving each with a shorter commute than she would have from Prineville. Tim works for Les Schwab in Prineville.

Miller is enthusiastic about both the school and her new opportunity as a fledgling administrator, despite the obvious budget troubles. Looking ahead to next year, she said the school will probably have to “downsize our staff a little bit further, but I can’t give you specifics yet. Right now we know that we have to have a budget that’s in line with our enrollment. That’s the central issue.”

She is not counting on any resumption of the Sisters School District program that helped support Sonrise teaching costs.

“I doubt that it will come back,” she said, “and even if I thought it would we wouldn’t be proceeding as if it would.”

She volunteered a further thought: “As an outsider coming to this community the thing that was most astonishing to me was the spirit of camaraderie between the public schools and private schools as well as home schools. Even with the difficulty of the financial situation this year, that has just come out loud and clear and that’s a tribute to the community.”

The fiscal problem could be eased, of course, if Sonrise enrollment increased. One sign pointing in that direction is that the school has been attracting more students from Redmond in particular.

“I think last year we probably had three Redmond families,” Miller said. “This year we have probably eight or nine.”

She doesn’t attribute that to overcrowding in the Redmond public schools, which has caused some students to transfer to Sisters public schools. Rather, she thinks “a lot of it is word of mouth. People who know about us talk to their friends.”

Sonrise operates in buildings leased from Sisters Community Church off Highway 242.

It has a current enrollment of 103 from preschool through eighth grade. Miller says it is probably the smallest of the five Christian schools in Deschutes and Crook counties, and the only one that neither has nor is trying to build a high school.

Miller’s own family contributes four students to the Sonrise mix.