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By Alan Gottlieb
Anyone who follows public education in Idaho closely knows that since arriving here a decade ago, Teach for America (TFA) has had an indelible, positive impact on the state.
A broad spectrum of alumni exemplify that impact. Whether they served as one of the 150 TFA corps members for two years in Idaho or served elsewhere and then moved here, many of the 30 or so alumni living in Idaho continue to be deeply involved in charter schools, district schools, and state policymaking.
“Teach For America’s goal is to advance opportunities for all students in Idaho, but particularly for students at a disadvantage, so that they can have the futures they want for themselves,” said Tony Ashton, who has been TFA Idaho’s executive director from day one. “By acting as a strategic talent partner and bringing more great leaders into Idaho’s education system, and then supporting their ongoing development, we’re helping to create the conditions for this to be possible.”
The following brief profiles of four TFA alumni living in Idaho, with very different backgrounds and life experiences, demonstrate the talent the organization attracts and then disperses across the state. All of these alumni remain deeply committed to education, whether in the classroom, the boardroom, the schoolhouse, or in helping shape policy in Idaho and elsewhere.
Harry Hukkinen
Harry Hukkinen was a landscape construction contractor in New Jersey when he and his wife Amy decided it was time for a change. He had worked in landscape construction for 35 years, and wanted to do work he found more meaningful, and that gave back to his community.
“I wanted to switch careers completely. I wanted to get out of construction, because I felt like I squeezed every drop out of it and I wanted to work in a profession where I felt like I was giving back rather than taking away, and that kind of limits things,” he said.
He learned about TFA while enrolled at Monmouth University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts summa cum laude – while in his 40s. He saw a flyer about a TFA presentation and attended, more or less, on a lark.
“I was not majoring in education, and I had not been planning on being a teacher. Then when I heard TFA’s lecture, I was like, wow, this is something that I could do,” Harry said. He and Amy discussed it on and off, and decided together that teaching as corps members for two years after graduation would be a meaningful and fulfilling next stage of their life.
Harry, who was born in Finland and emigrated to the U.S. with his parents as an infant, had never lived more than 45 minutes from a big body of water. So, when considering where to do their TFA service, Hawaii jumped out as a golden opportunity.
In 2013, after finishing their Master’s degrees, the Hukkinen’s left their home in New Jersey, attended TFA bootcamp in Arizona (Harry’s first time ever west of the Mississippi River), then decamped for Hawaii’s Big Island.
Harry taught at Connections Charter School in Hilo. His first year he had a second grade classroom, and then taught middle school science with art and snorkeling as electives the final year. Many of his students were native Hawaiians from low-income families.
“One of the things that was enticing about TFA was that they focused on underserved communities,” he said. “That just magnified my desire to want to work with them, because I was looking to do to work in a profession that was giving back, and working in underserved communities gave me that opportunity, feeling like I was teaching where it was most needed.”
After their two years in Hawaii, the Hukkinen’s moved to Idaho in 2015, where they both taught in the Wilder school district. Harry taught middle school science during his first year, then launched a K-12 arts program for the district.
Harry left Wilder at the beginning of the 2024-25 school year for an opportunity to become the founding kindergarten teacher at Idaho Novus Classical Academy, a charter school in Eagle.
“I was paying attention to the charter schools that were developing in Idaho (Amy is Bluum’s Director of Federal Grants and Support), and I wanted to work in a system where the mission and the vision were truly followed,” he said. “At Novus, the mission and vision are the spine and backbone of what everyone in the school is working on. They’re living it.”
TFA had just launched in Idaho when the Hukkinen’s arrived. Over the years, Harry has watched as TFA has exerted a positive influence on Idaho education. He said the organization has brought teachers from diverse backgrounds into what had been an insular environment.
“We were trained in what were considered the best practices from around the country, so that brought a new perspective,” he said. “And most TFA teachers are young, very enthusiastic, vigorous teachers. It was like a dousing of cold water on older ways of thinking.”
Duncan Robb
Growing up in affluent Marin County just north of San Francisco, Duncan Robb always attended top-flight public schools. By his own admission, he was blissfully unaware that in many urban centers, public education looked nothing like what he experienced in Marin.
“I had no idea about the educational inequities that our country was facing,” Duncan said. In college at the University of Oregon, where he majored in political science, he learned about TFA and its mission, and was intrigued. Also, he said, it was 2009, the height of the Great Recession, and jobs were scarce. TFA offered two years of guaranteed employment.
“During the interview process, what made me start to get really excited about TFA was the level of talent and competency that they were attracting to the organization,” Duncan said. “I wanted to be associated with an organization, with a movement that brought in top talent where it was needed.”
Duncan spent two years (2009-2011) teaching sixth-grade math in Houston. It was a transformative experience.
“Teaching in Houston really opened my eyes and that was what drove my continued career in the education space,” Duncan said. “The structure public education creates for most students intentionally writes them out of good schools like those I attended. They never even get the opportunity. I didn’t know any of that until I taught in Houston.”
Duncan said he became the person in his network of friends who tried to enlighten them to the realities of educational inequity he confronted in TFA, and to which they were oblivious. And that motivated him to move into the education policy space.
After finishing his two-year TFA stint, he attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he earned a Master’s in public policy in 2013. While in grad school he did an internship at the U.S. Education Delivery Institute, an organization that helped state education agencies with strategic planning and implementation.
During his second year at Hopkins, Duncan landed a part-time job with the organization, then won a full-time position upon graduation. That job connected him to state education chiefs around the country.
Duncan and his wife decided they wanted to leave the Washington D.C. area, and having traveled the country for his job, Duncan had concluded that “Boise was pretty sweet.” He reached out to Sherri Ybarra, then Idaho’s state superintendent, and she hired him in 2016 as her chief policy advisor.
After two-and-a-half years, Duncan decided to return to consulting on education policy. He now runs his own firm, Waypoint Education Partners with two other co-owners.
Duncan is also a longstanding board member at Gem Innovation Schools, Idaho’s largest charter school network. “The thing that I find so important about charter schools is that it’s a bargain. It’s a contract, more flexibility in return for more accountability for taxpayer funds and pursuing outcomes,” he said.
“Support and accountability is my ethos in life. I’m happy to hold someone accountable as long as I know they’ve been supported along the way.”
Brianna Stahly-Hale
Brianna Stahly-Hale graduated in 2021 from George Fox University, a small Christian school in Newberg Oregon, knowing she wanted to be a teacher.
She majored in education and was licensed and credentialed to teach in Oregon when she graduated. Rather than taking the traditional path of finding a job in a school district somewhere in the state, she opted for something different.
“I heard about this program called Teach for America and immediately was really hopeful and passionate about their mission and vision: that one day all children will have access to an equitable education.”
A Portland native, Brianna had always assumed she’d stay fairly close to home. But when she applied and got into TFA, her assignment was a third-grade classroom at Pioneer Elementary School in the rural farming community of Weiser, Idaho.
“My first reaction was ‘no way I’m going to Idaho. I don’t want to live in a desert.’ But I ended up coming to Idaho, a very different place from Portland, and I actually like it,” she said. Initially she thought she’d do her two-year stint and then return to Oregon. But four years after landing in Idaho, she’s still happily ensconced here.
Weiser, however, proved a bit rural for her tastes, and a long way from a group of peers she could hang out with.
So after her two years as a TFA corps member, Brianna took a job at New Horizons Dual Language Magnet Elementary School in Nampa at the start of the 2023-24 school year. She teaches kindergarten.
Why did Brianna choose to stay in Idaho? She said after teaching here, she perceived a need for passionate teachers who believe they can change the life trajectory of kids.
“Public education has the opportunity to really enhance and improve and change generations,” she said. “Oftentimes, in the general scheme of education, people look at a student and see where they come from and pigeonhole them into this is what they’re going to be in the future.”
Brianna said she does not take such a fatalistic view. “That’s just really not my heart. My heart in terms of kids, is knowing that it doesn’t really matter the circumstances that they’re born into. Obviously that shapes who they are, and it’s a part of their story, and that’s really beautiful. But they can really be whoever they want to be when they grow up.”
Teaching kindergarten in a time of such rapid technological change is humbling, Brianna said. It’s impossible to know what the world will be like in 10 years, when her current students are in high school.
“Being a teacher it’s my job to equip my students with tools in their tool belt, and then to help them figure out what tool they should be using next,” she said. “That’s what I love so much about it.”
Austin Ambrose
Austin Ambrose graduated from Ohio University and became a TFA Corps Member at Gem Prep in Nampa in 2017 with his sights already set on broader service to the public education world.
But what that service might look like has shifted in the intervening years, even as his commitment to serving students has deepened.
When he started his TFA service, Austin envisioned entering the world of education policy after his two-year teaching stint. Instead, he remained in his Gem Prep classroom for four years. Then he decided that working as a school administrator could broaden and deepen his impact on students.
In the summer of 2021 he took a job as dean of students at what was then known as Forge International, a new International Baccalaureate charter school in Middleton, now known as Sage International School Middleton. When he started there, the school served students in grades K-9, adding a great each year. Next year, Sage Middleton year will be a K-12 school.
The school had opened the year the pandemic hit and also went through an early leadership shake-up. This meant that when Austin came on board, it had not firmly established its culture. “My role was really focused on helping to build culture across the school, as well as supporting behavior,” he said.
He served in the dean’s role for two years. During that time, Austin and the school principal, Darci Stelzner, frequently discussed how overwhelming it was to oversee what was essentially three schools in one – elementary, middle and high.
Those discussions led to a decision to create an elementary director position to make the school leadership role more manageable. Austin applied and got the job. He is currently in his second year in that position.
Every time he assumes a new role, Austin said, he develops a new appreciation for the intricacies and complexities of running a strong public school. “I just keeping learning more about the bigger picture,” he said.
Being in charge of a school, Austin said, is “humbling, because I recognize that there’s still so much to learn. I just want to keep learning and being able to do better by my students and my staff, to make sure that we have the best school that we can possibly have.”
Austin said he still carried with him much of what he learned from TFA. “One of their core pillars was transformational change. That is what has really guided me. My time with TFA constantly reminded me to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I think oftentimes teachers get really honed in on their classrooms, because that’s their job. But it’s helpful to get a broader perspective.”
Taking that broader view has taught Austin that successful schools have to be deeply collaborative.
“It takes everybody. It’s the whole school. If you’re a fifth-grade teacher, you should care about and pay attention to what is going on in kindergarten. Because those kids are going to end up in your classroom eventually”.
Alan Gottlieb is a Colorado-based writer, editor, journalist, communications consultant, and nonprofit entrepreneur who owns Write.Edit.Think, LLC. He founded EdNews Colorado, which later merged with Gotham Schools to form Chalkbeat. He does consulting work for Bluum, an Idaho-based non-profit education group.
