School's out for Sonoma Country Day headmaster

Step through the lofty entryway to Sonoma Country Day School, listen to the achievements of some of the private academy’s students and alumni, and it becomes clear that founding headmaster Philip Nix has done well with the phase of his life that is just about to end.

On Wednesday, he’ll bid farewell to the kindergarten-through-eighth school that opened in 1983 within rented space at the former Luther Burbank Center. Nix’s leadership was in large part responsible for the school’s move in 2000 into a gracious campus of its own off of Airport Boulevard, northwest of Santa Rosa.

On June 10, a week after he leaves Sonoma Country Day, Nix turns 65. Pondering his next quest in life has him about as eager as when he readied to go into the Peace Corps, and to Africa, as a 21-year-old in 1965.

“When you look at the amount of suffering on the planet, it’s not like there aren’t things to do,” he said.

Bearded, intellectual and prone to verbatim quotations of poetry and philosophy, Nix believes retirement-age baby boomers are ideally suited to now choose an area of human endeavor in need of positive change, and go to work.

“Boomers are not finished,” he said. He believes that for seasoned ex-children of the ’60s to now apply themselves to constructive service sends a strong message of encouragement to young people who hear too often that most of what was good in life has gone bad.

“It’s not like it’s over, that we had the best times and they get the dregs,” the retiring schoolmaster said.

He’s an optimist, but that doesn’t mean he believes that boomers who roll up their sleeves on behalf of struggling people and an ailing world will necessarily be rewarded by seeing conditions improve.

“I’m old enough now to know that not everything works out,” he said. He’s thinking a lot these days about a saying from “Pirkei Avot,” the ethical teachings of Jewish forefathers.

Nix recited it: “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, neither are you at liberty to desist from it.” To him, that means that efforts on behalf of a better world are worthwhile and necessary, even if those making the efforts don’t live to see them come to fruition.

It’s not as though Nix suddenly transformed lives when he went to Nigeria in 1965 for a Peace Corps stint, one of the pivotal events of his education. He even had to cut short his mission as a teacher in rural villages when a secessionist campaign (it created Biafra) turned violent.

Nix closed out his African experience feeling altered by it.

“Nigeria changed everything for me,” he wrote in a 1996 essay that contributed to his selection for a visiting fellowship at Columbia University. “I had set out with the conviction that I would work with people who needed my help to overcome the boundaries of their traditional culture. I came away unconvinced that this had served Nigeria well. I also left with a new view of my own country: America was just as culture-bound as any isolated West African village.”

Prior to the Peace Corps, Nix, a New York native, studied at Columbia, expecting to become an English professor. As he completed his post-graduate work at Rutgers in 1970, he recalled, “university positions were drying up.”

So he and his wife, Susan, moved to Southern California, where he took job as assistant headmaster of a private preparatory school at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. From 1977 to 1983, he was headmaster of a private school near Palm Springs.

In 1983 he was found by “three energetic ladies” — Juelle Fisher, Trisha Coxhead and Ellen Wear — determined to create a first-rate independent school, neither public nor parochial, in Santa Rosa. The school Nix directs has now produced 600 alumni and this week will release 34 eighth-graders to their next learning adventures.

Nix will follow them out. He’ll begin the next phase of his life by returning to Southern California as site manager of a summer Center for Talented Youth program in La Jolla.

As he contemplates the sort of service he’ll seek after that, he said he’s inspired by the work that some of his students and former students are doing in the world. He mentioned Gabe Ferrick, the Sonoma Country Day seventh-grader who raised more than $15,000 to provide backpacks and school supplies for refugee children in Africa, and alum Naz Modirzadeh, who’s working to protect civilians in war zones through Harvard University’s Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research.

Nix leaves Sonoma Country Day School resolving “to have some impact on the people who have no say in their suffering.”

As with many new retirees, he expects to have no trouble staying busy.

You can reach Chris Smith at 521-5211 or chris.smith@

presssdemocrat.com.