LIFESTYLES WEEKEND, OCTOBER 20-21, 2018 “Our whole life was at school” — Rachel Riegert Staff photo by E.J. Harris Identical twin teachers Rachel and Alison Riegert both wanted to be teachers since they were children. Now the sisters teach at the same elementary school in Milton-Freewater. TEACHER! TEACHER! Twins Rachel and Alison Riegert have followed teaching careers to Milton-Freewater By ANTONIO SIERRA East Oregonian B eing in two places at once is a long sought-after skill for teachers across the country, but Gib Olinger Elementary School’s Miss Riegert has somehow mastered it. On the afternoon of Oct. 3, Miss Rie- gert was reading her kindergarten stu- dents a story on barnyard animals. Wearing a floral top and gray slacks, Miss Riegert occasionally paused to field questions on how horses sleep at night while some students clutched plush frogs, the theme of her room. As she led her students from Room 418 to the playground for recess, Miss Riegert was also in Room 615, drawing a picture of dogs on a porch on a projec- tor as a part of an in-class assignment. “I will be the first person to say that it’s not the best picture, but it looks like a dog,” Miss Riegert, wearing a floral top and gray slacks, told her students. After the students were ushered out of school for the day, Miss Riegert finally allowed herself to be in one place at the same time in Room 615, which has a bird theme. Whether it’s kindergarten teacher Rachel or third grade teacher Alison, all students at Gib Olinger Elementary School in Milton-Freewater know the identical twin teachers as Miss Riegert. The sisters grew up in Eugene want- ing to teach together. Their mother was a teacher, and the original vision involved co-teaching together in a farmhouse. “Our whole life was at school,” Contributed photo Alison and Rachel Riegert grew up in Eugene and always wanted to be teachers. Rachel said. Allergies prevented them from estab- lishing a farm-based school, but the pair followed through on a career in education. Attending college at Walla Walla Uni- versity brought them to the Inland North- west, and after graduating, the Riegerts took teaching jobs at Colville Valley Junior Academy, a Seventh-day Adven- tist school in northeastern Washington. Colville turned out not to be a great fit for the sisters, and after one year, they took jobs at Yakima Adventist Christian School in 2000. “We are very allergic to the outdoors and that’s all [there is] to do in Colville,” Alison said. Both of them taught elementary school in Yakima for eight years before a contraction at the school caused by lower enrollment caused them to recon- sider their options. They thought back to their college years, where everyone in the community knew them as “the twins.” So the Riegerts moved back to Col- lege Place and began taking substitute teaching jobs to support themselves. The sisters soon found themselves attached to the Milton-Freewater Uni- fied School District, where they filled in for jobs across town. “It just felt like the place we were supposed to be,” Alison said. In the meantime, the twins waited for full-time positions to open, and they eventually did: Alison started working at Ferndale Elementary School in 2014 and Rachel got a permanent gig in 2015. But the Riegerts wouldn’t be thrust back into the same school until this year, when Gib Olinger’s opening consoli- dated kindergarten through third grade under one roof. The twins’ photos on the staff page look like a layout error: two pictures of the same woman wearing identical clothes, glasses, lipstick and hairdo. The Riegerts said they wear the same outfits every day, and that’s the lifestyle they’re most comfortable with. They said they have similar tastes and ideas, not out of some sort of supernat- ural ESP, but just from being very close siblings. When they were younger, the sisters were taken on separate shopping trips to buy gifts for each other. They ended up buying each other the same things. The Riegerts live in the same house in College Place, and as evidenced by the interview, they often finish each other’s sentences. The sisters maintain that they have never pranked anyone using their identi- cal status, and people who spend enough time with them can tell the sisters apart. And their students also have ways of picking them apart. “Children zero in on the weirdest details,” Rachel said. For the especially eagle-eyed, Rachel wears a frog pin and Alison a bird pin to match their room decors. ——— Contact Antonio Sierra at asierra@ eastoregonian.com or 541-966-0836. Staff photos by E.J. Harris Left: Teacher Rachel Riegert leads a reading exercise with her kindergarten class recently at Gib Olinger Elementary School in Milton-Freewater. Right: Teacher Alison Riegert calms her class of third-graders before leading them out of the class at the end of the day recently at Gib Olinger Elementary School in Milton-Freewater.