Roma Sanders, a pianist and organist, has taught in Seventh-day Adventist schools on both the east and west coasts and in the Midwest. She presently teaches music at Great Plains Academy in Kansas.

Sanders was born and raised on a wheat and cattle farm in western Nebraska, one of five children born to Edward and Phyllis Stanley Sanders. While music was an important part of life in her home, she was the only sibling who would study and pursue it as a career. She started piano lessons at age seven and continued study on the instrument with Lilya Wagner while at Platte Valley Academy. She also played clarinet and saxophone in the academy band.

After graduating from PVA in 1965, she pursued a music degree at Union College where she studied piano under Robert Murray. Following completion of a B.S. in music education at UC in 1970, she began her teaching career at Madison Academy in Tennessee, where she taught for two years.

At that time she received the Winger Fellowship at Andrews University and took a year off for graduate study. While teaching at MA, Sanders studied composition with Charles Hall, organ with Warren Becker, piano with Blythe Owen, and music history with Hans Jorgen Holman. In the autumn of 1973, she began teaching at Garden State Academy, and in the summer of 1974 completed an M.A. in music at AU. She then taught for seven more years at GSA.

In 1981, she returned to Nebraska and taught at College View Academy in Lincoln for one year before returning to teach at her alma mater, Platte Valley Academy. When PVA began to downsize two years later, Sanders became music teacher at Midland Adventist School, now Academy, in Kansas, where she taught until 1987.

She accepted a music and English teaching position at Redding Junior Academy, now Redding Adventist Academy, in California, where she stayed until 1996. While there she received the Zapara Excellence in Teaching Award in 1992.

When the opportunity to teach just music at Sacramento Junior Academy, now Sacramento Adventist Academy, arose, she took the position and taught there for the next three years. She then began teaching at Napa Junior Academy, now Napa Christian Campus of Christian Education, a position she held for the next nine years.

In 2008, she returned to the Midwest to teach at GPA.

ds/2008