Going The Extra Mile … Or 90 Profs Endure Moscow To Coeur D’Alene Commute To Answer Growing Demand For Higher Education

Most of the construction flaggers on U.S. Highway 95 recognize Wayne Schmidt.

They wave and smile as the good-natured professor with a salt and pepper beard pulls out a bag of Doritos and patiently waits for them to finish laying fiberoptic cable along the roadside.

Schmidt is a member of Prof Express - a growing cadre of University of Idaho instructors who commute each week between Moscow and Coeur d’Alene to teach classes at the UI’s Coeur d’Alene Center. They volunteer to help corner a growing demand for higher education in North Idaho. They swear the older, more appreciative students in Coeur d’Alene - many who commute themselves from as far as Bonners Ferry - make up for a grueling drive.

“They knock themselves out,” Coeur d’Alene Center director Jack Dawson said this week. “It’s hard to drive two hours, teach three hours and then drive two hours home after already working a full day.”

Ask 29-year-old education instructor Kris Mickelson about going the extra mile.

Tuesday morning she arrived at her Moscow office a little after 6 a.m., taught an 8 a.m. class and then worked on her Ph.D. research from 10 to noon. She then left for Coeur d’Alene, but was waylaid when two logging trucks collided five miles south of Tensed. Rather than waiting out the two-hour delay, Mickelson turned around, backtracked through Palouse, Wash., to Spokane and then Coeur d’Alene. She was an hour and 15 minutes late to her first 4 p.m. class. After teaching a second 7 to 10 p.m. class, she got back behind the wheel of her minivan, bought an iced tea at the Chevron station and called her husband on the pay phone. If she’s not home by 1 a.m., she explained, he’ll start driving the other direction to look for her along the roadside.

“I don’t want to sound like a martyr because this is everyone’s story, not just poor Kris,” she said. “Everybody has to take their turn.”

Turns. Twists. Narrow corridors. Icy patches. Construction.

Every year, Highway 95 takes the lives of motorists who drift too near the narrow road’s abrupt shoulder or faded center line.

The battered 90-mile stretch between Coeur d’Alene and Moscow is a thoroughfare for logging trucks, chip trucks and boat-towing trucks. It’s the chosen route for casino gamblers, Canadians in Winnebagos and cheapskates craving discount Camels at the Coeur d’Alene Reservation.

The potholes are deep, hungry tire-gougers. Deer cross regularly and kids dart across the streets of the tiny towns along the way.

The UI’s mobile mentors aren’t paid more. They aren’t offered extra insurance or hazard pay, just 28 cents a mile, the option of using a state vehicle or spending a night in Coeur d’Alene’s Comfort Inn if weather conditions or fatigue hinder safe driving.

The UI could offer courses solely through long-distance microwave technology. But as Kootenai County continues to grow, so does the demand for warm bodies behind the lectern.

“Everybody realizes that Coeur d’Alene is where it’s going to be in the future,” Mickelson said. “That’s where the population base is expanding and it’s where there’s a UI need that isn’t being contested by another institution.”

From Coeur d’Alene, students can receive their teacher certification, or a baccalaureate degree in elementary, secondary, vocational or physical education. The center also offers a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology and a master’s in counseling and human services. There are eight full-time and five part-time UI employees at the center, including two faculty members.

But the number of commuting professors is expected to keep growing, particularly as resource jobs dwindle and rural populations seek re-training in other professions. Land grant universities across the West are struggling to meet their rural responsibilities.

“I hear the same thing from my colleagues in Montana and Wyoming, ” Dawson said. “It’s hit the road, Jack.”

The trips to Coeur d’Alene aren’t all just stressful white-knuckle driving. Literacy and Indian education specialist Georgia Johnson said Coeur d’Alene’s Thai food was the highlight of her week during commutes last year.

“If you live in Moscow, you starve,” Johnson said. “Coeur d’Alene has food.”

For Schmidt, 43, the drive is a soothing sensory experience.

“It’s smells, sights and emotions,” Schmidt said. “Memories.”

He doesn’t listen to the radio. He prefers to loosen his tie, roll down the window of his red Mazda pickup and watch the world whiz by, his canoe rack whistling above him.

The smell of hay, bustle of wheat harvest, and struggle of a wobbly newborns remind him of childhood days frittered away with his siblings on a Missouri farm.

A former science teacher, he routinely identifies North Idaho flora, watches weather patterns and monitors the snowline on the mountains above St. Maries.

In the fall, he secretly envies “pyromaniac farmers” torching their grass fields and recalls his stint as a school bus driver when he sees children bounding up their driveways after school.

But the drive, no matter how interesting, is not the primary reason he volunteered to commute.

“I like the set of students in Coeur d’Alene,” Schmidt said.

They’re an older, nontraditional sort - displaced millworkers, divorced single moms - students serious about learning.

“Usually the first day of class is just blank stares,” Mickelson said. “But these students were magpies.”

The fresh out of high school 18-year-olds who study at UI’s Moscow campus sometimes have a hard time relating to adulthood and becoming a responsible teacher, Schmidt said. “Most of the students in Coeur d’Alene have suffered through something and made the decision to go back to school.”

“They make it worth the drive, worth not seeing my family two nights a week.”

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