{"id":21534,"date":"2024-10-02T01:08:21","date_gmt":"2024-10-02T07:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=21534"},"modified":"2024-10-01T16:10:57","modified_gmt":"2024-10-01T22:10:57","slug":"teacher-and-state-representative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/02\/teacher-and-state-representative\/","title":{"rendered":"Teacher and State Representative"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY ISAIAH FRIZZELL<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u201cChris Hansen.\u201d Many people have asked who this person is and we dug in to find out more.<\/p>\n

Music is Math<\/strong>
\nChris 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.
\nWhen 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 \u201colly olly oxen free\u201d when they meet the dog! Where does the saying come from? Hansen knew the answer. \u201cI think it\u2019s a kid\u2019s 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\u2019d say, olly olly oxen free.\u201d He laughs, solving the mystery.
\nHansen is a dedicated father. His name comes up at the Sawtooth Brewery open mic where he often plays guitar. \u201cThe big thing is just to show my two boys that it\u2019s 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.\u201d A father of two, one of Hansen\u2019s sons has become quite the ukulele talent at C\u2019s Mountain School of Music. \u201cThey tell me the ukulele is the new recorder\u2026 you know, that plastic flute thing we all grew up with. We\u2019re super stoked to have Daniel, my oldest boy, playing the uke. He\u2019s got all the cowboy chords down. I\u2019m hoping to one day play a duet with him, but maybe a few years down the line.\u201d
\nA third-generation Idahoan, Hansen\u2019s 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. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Public Servants<\/strong>
\nHansen 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\u2019s 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.
\nHansen 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. \u201cMy wife, who\u2019s the rock star here, at The Nature Conservancy, well, she can\u2019t take days off. And so we just kind of said together, hey, maybe it\u2019s time that I take a break. And so I took what\u2019s called a sabbatical. They offer that to you after seven years. And so it\u2019s 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.\u201d
\nPrograms like this are what drive Hansen to want to serve in support of families. He believes in the positive forces that proper programs incentivize. \u201cI think that the number one thing is you can\u2019t take money away from public schools, like the Idaho Legislature is entertaining with these private voucher schemes. You can\u2019t 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\u2019s no school choice for those people any way that you paint it. So you can\u2019t take away an institution. You just have to fund it properly.
\n\u201cI 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\u2019re 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\u2019s great to be able to teach my kid for maybe a week or two, and then you\u2019re like, I really wish I had the teachers back. And I think that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the idea of maintenance, <\/strong>
\nI\u2019m in praise of maintenance.\u201d<\/strong>
\nThis could almost be Hansen\u2019s tagline: managing the upkeep of institutions, people\u2019s mental health and the shifting roles we all play in the post-pandemic world.
\n\u201cI 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\u2019re paying our teachers and they feel like they\u2019re 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\u2019ve got families.
\n\u201cYou 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\u2019s just being cruel. And people will say, \u2018Oh, well, you know, if you teach a person to fish, they\u2019ll be able to\u2026\u2019, you know the adage, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s applicable here. We\u2019re talking about children. We\u2019re teaching them how to fish right now. They don\u2019t have it yet. They\u2019re 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\u2019t eaten breakfast. So I really feel like we\u2019ve got to take care of our school children and those people that are in our public schools.\u201d
\nA 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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cChris Hansen.\u201d Many people have asked who this person is and we dug in to find out more. Music is Math Chris Hansen has taught math […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21535,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,75,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-community","8":"category-elections","9":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21536,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21534\/revisions\/21536"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}