Mary Dorothy Poulton Hunt Gillis, who ran a small private school in Kaimuki for nearly 50 years, died Nov. 26. She was 97.

Island Paradise Academy, 1238 Wilhelmina Rise, was founded by Gillis’ mother, Dorothy Hunt, in 1942, with the help of Gillis and her twin sister. Gillis left high school at Sacred Hearts Academy to help her mother run the school. The school’s earliest beginnings were in the 1930s with seven students using a rented house for a classroom before it moved to the Kaimuki campus. Gillis took over as head of school in the 1960s, after her mother retired.

At its peak Island Paradise Academy enrolled more than 400 children in grades K-6, and Gillis knew all their names. She wanted to make it the finest small, reasonably priced private school on the island. To that end, even as administrator, she swept, cooked, drove the bus, taught hula and ran day care, if a teacher was absent.

Gillis was born on Prospect Street in Honolulu, seven minutes before her twin sister, Joan, to the Rev. Ernest Shinkaku Hunt and Dorothy Hunt, who were both originally from England. Ernest Hunt was an adventurer who worked for a sugar plantation in British Guiana and traveled across North America before settling in Hawaii to work at sugar plantations on Hawaii island and Oahu. Hunt felt a calling to the Buddhist faith and was ordained at the Hilo Hongwanji in 1922. He was eventually ordained as a Soto priest in 1953 and was honored as the first Westerner to be given the title “osho,” or high priest.

Gillis married John Schleif in 1938 in what the newspapers called a unique ceremony that mixed both Buddhist and Christian traditions. They had two daughters and divorced in 1962. In 1964 she married Gordon Gillis. The couple bought a home on Monterey Drive, up the hill from the school. Island Paradise Academy closed in 1999.

Gillis is survived by daughters Gwen Bell and Pam Kapana; stepchildren Lola Wright, Peter Gillis and Liz Sutter; 13 grandchildren; 26 great-grandchildren; and three great-great-grandchildren. A celebration of life will be held at 10 a.m. Jan. 23 at Soto Mission in Nuuanu.