During the 1970s, St. Helen's Hall and Bishop Dagwell Hall became one school, in the process changing their names to Oregon Episcopal School. The two schools had shared the same campus since the move to Raleigh Hills and the formation of BDH in 1964, but classes and administration were separate. In 1972, they merged to form a single, coeducational institution with the name "The Oregon Episcopal Schools, St. Helen's Hall, Bishop Dagwell Hall." By the end of the decade, the name had been shortened, the school was on a firmer financial footing, international students were being actively recruited, and an outdoor program had been created.

With the departure of headmaster David Leech in 1974, the Board of Trustees was looking for a new person to lead the school. A seasoned veteran was needed, but the school's financial situation didn't allow it to afford such a person. The Board took a chance on a 35-year-old who had never been the head of a school.
“I was a kid and there’s no way I could have done it without my wife, Margaret,” said the Rev. Peter Sipple, who returned with Margaret in 2004 for a visit to the school he had led for eight years. “I think OES was willing to take a huge risk at that point and I was honored to be able to take on the job.”

One of his first tasks was to establish a more concise name for the school.

. “One of the things about OES was that we weren’t exactly sure what our name was," he said. "The name of the school was The Oregon Episcopal Schools, St. Helen’s Hall, Bishop Dagwell Hall. Now can you imagine cheering that on the sidelines? We decided that maybe there should be a shorter name.

“There was a large contingent of faculty and some of the students who wanted to call it ‘The Hall.’ I had a problem with that because it didn’t sound like a school to me. It sounded a bit more like a retirement community. We took a risk and proposed to the Board that we name it Oregon Episcopal School. That one letter of ‘s’ dropped off the end did huge things for us. It really meant that we were going to take the plunge and not try to be two schools. We were going to become one school.”

That one school was in danger of becoming no school. If enrollment had fallen by another 20 to 30 students, Peter said, the school might have shut down.

“It was brought home to me at the end of my first year when I had to telephone a number of school families and ask them if they could pay their full tuition up front because that first year we couldn’t afford to pay the teachers over the summer,” he said. “That was a little worrisome but people came through, and the faculty came through. We redefined full-time loads and the faculty deserve tremendous credit because they hung in there through thick and thin, and this happened to be the thin.”

Reductions in salary and the number of faculty allowed the school to balance the budget, but it also needed to renegotiate the mortgage on the campus and other debts. The bank was insisting on collateral, and fortunately the diocese stepped in and guaranteed the loan.

“While we usually think about the school’s church connection in theological terms, that was a very concrete way in which the school became the Oregon Episcopal School,” Peter said, emphasizing the word “Episcopal.”

What sustained the school through those difficult times was a sense of community in which everyone pulled together. Peter told a story to illustrate that common purpose.

“Margaret and I were at a Thanksgiving service in what was then the cathedral and Father Bob was preaching a sermon and in the midst of his sermon we heard a huge crash. We came out after the service and the bell tower had fallen over. We said, that’s OK, we’ll build it back up again, so a couple of weeks later we used a design by a Japanese boarding student and we put it up. It’s not the one that’s there today, but it was there for 10 or 15 years and it was homegrown. It was that homegrown aspect that made OES so remarkable to us.”

Longtime teacher Pamela Vohnson, who came to OES a year before Peter and Margaret, attributes much of that community spirit to Peter’s leadership. She said during an interview in spring 2004:

“Peter had a way of tapping the strengths of the people who worked here and affirming those strengths. It was never in a manner such that you thought he learned it in a graduate program about how to be a good administrator. They were affirmations that came from the heart, and he knew what people were doing.”

Pamela said the challenges of the time were great, but so were the rewards.

“Our support staff was minimal. More than one summer I painted my classroom myself because it needed painting. It was not unusual to see Peter mowing the lawn on the weekend. I remember feeling this revelation of what a community could be like. Especially living on campus. There were a number of families on campus who had young children. In the summertime we would have weekly potlucks or BBQs. We took care of each other’s kids a lot. You knew where in somebody else’s refrigerator to go to find eggs if you had run out. To fall into a community here was a heady thing. It was wonderful.”

Among the changes that occurred in the 1970s was a shift to a greater emphasis on day students. Peter Sipple said St. Helen’s Hall had been about 50-50 with boarding and day students, but there was growing interest in the Portland area for a good day school.

“I have the feeling that the market drove that decision more than anything else, Peter said. “We were really struggling to fill up our boarding program.”

While demand for the boarding program was declining among families in rural areas of the Pacific Northwest, demand from overseas students was growing. When Iran was thrown into turmoil around the time that the Shah of Iran was overthrown, some Iranians sent their children out of the country. Because a small Iranian community existed in Portland, a number of families sent their children to OES.

“They were generally good students and generally well-behaved,” Peter said. “It was good for the school. I think it only lasted three or four years.”

Peter’s wife, Margaret, added, “The international students were always an enhancement to the life of the school. That was something that most public high schools couldn’t offer. It was always a welcome addition.”

OES began offering English as a Second Language classes to integrate the growing number of international students into the school. OES was also attracting English-speaking international students from Saudi Arabia, which at the time did not allow the children of American workers to attend high school in the kingdom.

“We had a strong connection with the Middle East in those days because we not only had Iranian students, we also had American students whose families worked for Aramco,” said Pamela Vohnson. “That continued through the early 90s.”

Another 1970s initiative was the Base Camp Program, which became a big part of the school’s identity.

“Kids did a lot in the woods,” said Pamela. “Freshmen did a Mt. Jefferson Wilderness trip, the sophomores climbed Mt. Hood, the juniors did trail work for the Forest Service, and seniors did an Outward Bound type of trip in the Ochocos. All of those trips bonded kids together in the classes, but it was very rugged. It was hard for some of those freshman who had never been out in the woods before to go backpacking as their very first high school experience.”

Because of the challenges and the changes of the 1970s, life at OES was sometimes difficult but also very fresh and exciting.

“We had the history of SHH but it felt very new educationally,” Pamela said. “Because of the perceived problems, it was a place where you could give 20 hours a day. It was a very exciting place to work in those days.”

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