Dr. Serge Wright, an optometrist who has practiced in Sedona since 1973, clearly loves his job.

Wright, wearing a crisp logo dress shirt, was in a good mood in his Soldier Pass office on a recent afternoon, but he became even more buoyant as he began an eye exam on Christy Weast, the office manager for Sedona Eye Care.

As he narrated the exam for the benefit of his onlookers, working the knobs and dials on his slit lamp — a device used for shining a light beam into the eye — he appeared happy to be on his stool and at work. Even though he has gone through these motions tens of thousands of times in his 46 years of practice, Wright seems to sincerely enjoy peering at lenses and corneas and making sure everything in the eye is as it should be.

“I think if you ask anybody, ‘Other than your life, what sense would you not like to lose?’ I think most people would say their vision. To me, trying to prevent things that can blind people, trying to prevent blind­ness, it’s been my life,” he said.

Wright believes he was the town’s second or third optometrist. For many years, Wright had to split his time between Sedona and Phoenix and then Sedona and Flagstaff, until 2000 when he devoted all of his time to Sedona Eye Care, the practice he started in 1973.

The newest doctor to the practice is Dr. Kendra Ivy, the Wright’s second child and a member of the first graduating class from Sedona Red Rock High School.

If Wright and his wife, Kathy, a regis­tered nurse, had done nothing but treat the eyes and bodies of Sedonans over the decades, their contributions to the commu­nity would have been invaluable — espe­cially in a rural region that sometimes faces shortages of medical providers.

But while they were raising a family in Sedona, Serge and Kathy got involved in the community beyond their day jobs and engaged with the civic life of the town during a formative period in Sedona’s history.

One of the more noteworthy efforts was their work in creating the Sedona-Oak Creek School District.

“Sedona was a part of three different school districts: Cottonwood-Oak Creek [School District], Mingus [Union High  School District], and Flagstaff [Unified School District],” Kathy Wright explained. “So Serge and a group of men actually convinced the legislators to change state law so that Sedona could have its own school district because we were in two separate counties. And that had never been allowed before.”

The Wrights, with many neighbors and community leaders, helped build things — like Sedona Red Rock High School — which are easy to take for granted today. 

While the Wrights can look at the institutions they helped create with pride, their reflections on Sedona today are mingled with concern for the city’s future. The Wrights helped make Sedona a good place to raise a family, but they, and others, see threats to that vision. 

Getting Started in Sedona

Kathy and Serge grew up in Porterville, Calif., a small farming community in the San Joaquin Valley between Fresno and Bakersfield.
“I grew up in the middle of a citrus and cattle ranch,” Serge said.

Serge’s mother was born in France and met Serge’s father while he was stationed in France during World War II. 
Though nothing in his West­ern American English dialect would suggest it, Serge speaks a little French and has traveled to the country several times.

Though they grew up in the same town, Serge and Kathy didn’t meet until they took the same zoology class in junior college. As the couple remembers it, the sparks first flew when they were partnered together on a frog vivisection.

“I cut the top of his skull off so we could stick the pins in and watch the neurologi­cal experiments,” Serge added, “and after that she asked me out.”

“I just wasn’t going to cut that poor frog’s head off,” Kathy said.

Later, the couple moved from the country to glamorous — and smoggy — Los Ange­les, where Kathy studied nurs­ing and Serge studied optom­etry at the Southern California College of Optometry. 

Los Angeles’ big city glitz failed to entice the Wrights to that life, and after Serge gradu­ated, they started looking for a small town to settle in.

“People said, ‘Why do you want to go to a small town?’” Serge recalled. “I said, ‘I want to go someplace where I can’t see the air that I breath, but I can see the stars at night.’”

The Wrights heard about Sedona from an assistant dean’s secretary at Serge’s college, who planned to retire here, and so they put the town on their list of possibilities.

“A year after we got married, we loaded up our sleeping bags and tent and traveled all through Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, basically looking for a place that we felt could be home,” Kathy said.

For the Wrights, that place was Sedona.

Civic Involvement

Serge’s optometry origin story is that he knew he want­ed leave the farm and get into health care, so he went around to all of the health care provid­ers in Porterville, Calif., to choose a field. 

“The guy that was the happi­est and the most enthused about what he was doing was my optometrist. He loved it … The guy just loved what he did, and I love what I do” Serge said.

Though Serge and Kathy left Porterville, they kept their small town values and appre­ciation for country life. Their living room is adorned with Western décor, includ­ing a leather saddle, and the walls are filled with hunting trophies, including massive elk antlers harvested over a life­time of hunting, which Serge learned as a child. The shelves are adorned with American Indian pottery and large collec­tions of Zane Grey and Mark Twain novels.

One of the small-town values the Wright’s retained was community involvement, and they become engaged Sedonans early on. 

Serge joined the Sedona Oak Creek Canyon Lions Club, an organization he has presided over once every decade since 1977. One of the special causes of the Lions internationally is vision, and the local club has helped provide vision care to those in need locally and overseas.
Kathy became involved in local education, serving on the Mingus Union High School District Governing Board for two years.

However, the desire for a high school in Sedona seems to have spurred the Wrights’ civic engagement to an even higher level. 

Kathy said the couple want­ed a high school in Sedona because that’s where their kids were. Their first child, Ryan, graduated from Mingus Union High School.

“He would leave the house at 6 a.m., and if he was in athlet­ics, he would end up back home at 7:30 or 8 p.m. by the time the athletic bus ran. And it was even worse for Flagstaff students,” she explained.

Families who lived on the Coconino County side of Sedona were part of the Flagstaff Unified School District and sent their high schoolers up the Oak Creek Canyon switchbacks to Flagstaff High School.

Serge said that many residents felt like Sedona was treated as the “rich stepchild” by their respective school districts. In their view, the town provided a disproportionate amount of tax dollars but received short shrift when it came to school resources.

Serge said his committee first appealed to Mingus and Flagstaff to build a high school in Sedona so students wouldn’t have to be bused. They faced resistance from the districts, because neither wanted to spend the money on a new high school. 

“It was a long process. It was probably a year before [the school districts] basically said, ‘Don’t confuse us with the facts; we’re not going to build a high school in Sedona,’” he said.

The next step then was to form their own district, but Sedona residents faced a hurdle there: To create a school district across two counties, the city needed a bill passed in the state legislature. 

Serge served as liaison between the committee and the legislature, helping orga­nize community members to testify at the capital in support of the bill. 

“There was guys in that group that really spoke well before the legislature,” Serge said.

John Wettaw, Sedona’s repre­sentative, helped usher the bill though, and the Sedona-Oak Creek School District was created.

“It was a battle. I felt like I was a part of it,” remembered the Wrights’ daughter and now business partner, Kendra Ivy, who was in SRRHS’ first graduating class. “Every morning on the radio there was something about getting the school district.”

More Challenges

To hear members of the Wright family talk about it, creating SOCSD was in some ways the easy part. The real battles came after that.

For starters, Sedona had a school district, but it didn’t have a budget or an office yet. Serge said that teacher resumes started pour­ing in from across the country, and they were stacked beneath their dining room table. The Wrights’ fax machine, one of the first in the neighborhood, was the school district’s official fax at the beginning.

When SRRHS was eventually built, some in the community were skeptical about the new school, and many Sedona families continued to send children to Mingus. 

Ivy said that concerned residents would even drop in on the new school when she was a student.

“We had community members in our class­rooms the first two years,” she said.

“My mom was the president and they had community meetings at the elementary school in the library,” she adds. “That place would be packed out and people just scream­ing at each other, fighting outside the door. I mean it was awful; it was so awful,” she said of the rancor surrounding some of the deci­sion-making in the early years.

Eventually, Sedona Red Rock High School became “very well accepted” by the local community. Enrollment of elementary-age students swelled so significantly that another school — Big Park Community School — was built in Village of Oak Creek.

Kathy served on the SOCSD school board for a total of seven years before handing off the reins to others.

“I really kind of stepped back after I was on the board,” she said. “My experience has been ex-board members usually think they know too much, and so I didn’t want that.”

Eyeglasses for Africa

One way Serge has stayed involved with local schools in recent years is through a philanthropic partnership between the local Lions Club and the Verde Valley School.

Since 2012, Serge has helped VVS prepare 22,000 donated glasses for distribution in Malawi, a landlocked nation in southeast Africa and one of the world’s least developed countries.

Caroline Deihl, director of global goals at VVS, said that the school uses Sedona Eye Care as a base for their program, using the space to test prescriptions and sort and label glasses. 

Serge showed the VVS students how to use the lensometer to determine an eye glasses’ prescription, and then the students work on Sedona Eye Care’s machines on their own.

“He’s eager to help, but let’s them be inde­pendent,” Diehl said. “He’s really patient as well … I think he really cares.”

Diehl said that Serge’s strong industry connections have also been instrumental in obtaining new low-vision prescription glasses, which are more expensive and rare­ly donated, from VSP, the nation’s largest vision insurance company. The Lions Club also provides funding for assistance from local optometrists in Malawi.

After the glasses are prepared, VVS students physically carry them, in about eight suitcases, to Malawi in June.

Diehl noted that giving people access to vision often has a powerful and immediate impact on lives, and so the project really shows VVS students that their effort can make a difference in the world.

For his philanthropic work, Serge received the Melvin Jones Fellow Humanitarian Award, the highest award in Lions Club International.
The ‘Chance to Raise a Family and Enjoy Life’

After mentioning his mother’s and father’s experiences in World War II — Serge’s G.I. father oversaw a cemetery in Southern France where U.S., French and German dead were buried — Serge becomes quiet and thoughtful for a moment in the living room of his home beneath Coffee Pot Rock.

“We have a lot of exchange students come [to Sedona],” he said, “and you wonder why we’re involved in these conflicts when all the kids that you meet from all these countries all want the same thing: They want a chance to raise a family and enjoy life and live in peace.”

This vision of a world where everybody can just raise a family and enjoy life seems like a driving force behind the Wrights’ work — professional and volunteer — in Sedona.

In many ways, it feels like the Wrights and others’ efforts in the ’90s have paid off. Today, Sedona is a vibrant community with local schools and parks and other community amenities. By many accounts, it’s a comfortable, peaceful place to live. 

But on the other hand, elemen­tary school enrollment in SOCSD is roughly half of what it’s been in the past, according to Serge. The drop compelled the district to close the Big Park Community School in May 2018. 

“Now our challenge in keeping the school open is the darn Airb­nbs,” Serge added, “and we just don’t have families that live here anymore.” 

Serge believes there were a lot more families raising kids when he and Kathy were lobbying for a high school. He notes that the superintendent of SOCSD, Dennis Dearden, reported having new hires back out due to the lack of affordable housing. 

“Red dirt is expensive,” Kathy said. 

“I think we’re becoming more of a tourist location now because of the amount of Airbnbs. It’s changed the community; it really has,” Serge continued. “I think in order to have a vibrant communi­ty, you’ve got to have those young families be part of it, be involved … There’s nothing that a working family getting started can afford.” 

But if Sedona is facing dangers, it seems like it will not be too great for the city as long as there are residents like the Wrights. 

After all, in the course of an interview, Kathy stepped out for a meeting of the Sedona Education­al Foundation, a group serving as a bridge between the community and the school district. And later in the day, the Wright’s had to leave to attend a planning session for addressing the needs of home­less children in the SOCSD. 

As for optometry, Serge said he plans to continue practicing at Sedona Eye Care for five more years before handing off the practice to his daughter. 

“One of the Sedonan kids we educated that came back,” Serge remarked. 

“Have to leave to know what you’re missing,” she quipped back.