Center Row Not Sorting Fields Properly

Good morning. I have an issue that I am hoping may be resolved. Even though I have customized sort options in center row using a custom ontology, it seems as though the results being returned from those are defaulting to the internal id, rather than the data. Specifically, I have a “model number” field that I am trying to sort but the results returned are dependent on the order I import the data (hence my belief this is an internal id sort), rather than that model number field. Do I need to configure the sort preferences somewhere outside of the theme browse page?

Any help is much appreciated.

here is what I am running:

Omeka S
Version 2.0.2
PHP
Version 7.1.31
SAPI litespeed
Memory Limit 512M
POST Size Limit 128M
File Upload Limit 128M
Garbage Collection Yes
Extensions bcmath, bz2, calendar, Core, ctype, curl, date, dom, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, hash, iconv, imagick, imap, inotify, intl, json, libxml, litespeed, mbstring, mcrypt, mysqli, mysqlnd, openssl, pcntl, pcre, PDO, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, Phar, posix, readline, Reflection, session, shmop, SimpleXML, soap, solr, SPL, sqlite3, standard, tokenizer, xml, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, zlib
MySQL
Server Version 5.6.45-cll-lve
Client Version 5.6.45
Mode NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION
OS
Version Linux 2.6.32-954.3.5.lve1.4.67.el6.x86_64 x86_64