BY ISAIAH FRIZZELL
When you drive through the Wood River Valley, through the side streets and neighborhoods, you see signs in yards. One of the more prevalent signs reads “Chris Hansen.” Many people have asked who this person is and we dug in to find out more.
Music is Math
Chris Hansen has taught math at Wood River High School for eight years. Currently on sabbatical, he is focused on family and a campaign for election to the Idaho House of Representatives to represent District 26B, which covers all of Blaine County all the way down to Jerome.
When I spoke to Hansen, he was taking care of his 14-year-old yellow Lab, Ollie. He laughed when I mentioned that I, too, know a dog named Ollie and wondered why everyone, myself included, says “olly olly oxen free” when they meet the dog! Where does the saying come from? Hansen knew the answer. “I think it’s a kid’s game, you know, like kick the can or freeze tag or something, when you were a kid. When the game was over everybody could come out, they could stop their hiding, everybody was safe. You’d say, olly olly oxen free.” He laughs, solving the mystery.
Hansen is a dedicated father. His name comes up at the Sawtooth Brewery open mic where he often plays guitar. “The big thing is just to show my two boys that it’s okay to get up in front of people and play, and maybe even make a few mistakes, but still, to just do it and not worry.” A father of two, one of Hansen’s sons has become quite the ukulele talent at C’s Mountain School of Music. “They tell me the ukulele is the new recorder… you know, that plastic flute thing we all grew up with. We’re super stoked to have Daniel, my oldest boy, playing the uke. He’s got all the cowboy chords down. I’m hoping to one day play a duet with him, but maybe a few years down the line.”
A third-generation Idahoan, Hansen’s grandparents immigrated from Switzerland. They settled just north of Shoshone in District 26 as Mormon pushcart pioneers; they were potato farmers. The other side of his family are potato farmers as well, from Colorado. After their farm was swallowed up in the Dust Bowl, they were trying to make it to Oregon but ran out of money and settled right around Melba, Idaho. “My parents were the first members of the family to graduate from college, and they met each other when they were fighting fires in Shoshone for the Bureau of Land Management.”
Public Servants
Hansen grew up in Boise. His mother was a teacher, who became a principal, and his father was one of the civil engineers who built the roads in Ada County. Public service is in his blood. He’s worked as a wildland firefighter and community organizer for conservation groups. He graduated from the College of Idaho in 2006. After meeting his wife, 12 years ago, he convinced her to go traveling with him. They trekked all through Southeast Asia, finally stopping in Cambodia before deciding to land in Idaho when it was time to make a home.
Hansen began teaching math at Wood River High School in Hailey, creating one of the only new math courses there. He recently, with the help of the Blaine County School District, decided to take some time off. “My wife, who’s the rock star here, at The Nature Conservancy, well, she can’t take days off. And so we just kind of said together, hey, maybe it’s time that I take a break. And so I took what’s called a sabbatical. They offer that to you after seven years. And so it’s a little bit of a pause. I feel really grateful to Blaine County School District that they have that program and that they recognize the need for people to take breaks and try different things.”
Programs like this are what drive Hansen to want to serve in support of families. He believes in the positive forces that proper programs incentivize. “I think that the number one thing is you can’t take money away from public schools, like the Idaho Legislature is entertaining with these private voucher schemes. You can’t rob the public school system, especially in places like Richfield and Dietrich and Shoshone, and these small communities within this district that only have one school. There’s no school choice for those people any way that you paint it. So you can’t take away an institution. You just have to fund it properly.
“I think that if you can provide incentives for daycare providers, for early childhood education folks, and then create a market to incentivize people to be those daycare providers, then you’re going to go a long way. We found that out during COVID. You saw who the essential workers were, you saw who people within the community were. It’s great to be able to teach my kid for maybe a week or two, and then you’re like, I really wish I had the teachers back. And I think that’s the same thing that happens with nurses; the idea of burnout is real. And, you know, giving people those opportunities to take some time off and to deal with their own mental health issues is a huge thing we can invest in.”
“It’s the idea of maintenance,
I’m in praise of maintenance.”
This could almost be Hansen’s tagline: managing the upkeep of institutions, people’s mental health and the shifting roles we all play in the post-pandemic world.
“I always call myself a radical centrist. There are things that we need, that are essential things, like education for our children. We need to get over to centralist ideas. Make sure that the roads are paved and in good shape. Make sure we’re paying our teachers and they feel like they’re getting a good end of the bargain. Make sure that people can buy homes in the place in which they live, and try to make sure that they have childcare if they’ve got families.
“You know, the SNAP benefits CHIP program in the summer. The White House would have given us $16 million if we could have just approved $500,000 for hungry kids during the summer. The Idaho Legislature voted that down. I have a lot of fiscally conservative views, but that is not one of them.That is not even about being fiscally conservative, it’s just being cruel. And people will say, ‘Oh, well, you know, if you teach a person to fish, they’ll be able to…’, you know the adage, but I don’t think that’s applicable here. We’re talking about children. We’re teaching them how to fish right now. They don’t have it yet. They’re not 18 years old yet, you know? I worked at the high school and I saw what being hungry does to a kid in the afternoon or in the morning if they haven’t eaten breakfast. So I really feel like we’ve got to take care of our school children and those people that are in our public schools.”
A teacher and father himself, Hansen cares deeply about the children and public servants who are the future of the community and seeks to help better manage the infrastructure that builds a growing town. The signs are in those lawns for a reason.