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.