‘It hasn’t even totally hit me yet.’ Idaho high schoolers get inside look at Biden visit
Myrie Murphy, 17, got an invitation Sunday to see President Joe Biden during his visit to Boise.
Murphy, a student at Boise High School and a member of the Youth Climate Action Council, said she was honored when she found out she was going to get to meet the president during his visit to Idaho, where he spoke Monday about climate change and the toll wildfires have taken in the West.
“It was really such an amazing opportunity for me,” Murphy told the Idaho Statesman.
She was one of several people who got to join Boise Mayor Lauren McLean to meet with Biden.
The experience leading up to seeing Biden was “kind of scary,” Murphy said. When driving over, she said she saw a lot of Trump supporters and faced calls from protesters telling her group to take their masks off.
“But other than that, it was so amazing,” Murphy said. “Actually meeting the president was super cool. It wasn’t just a hello, nice to meet you.”
She got to have a brief conversation with the president, she said, to tell him how grateful she was to him for coming to Idaho, supporting the region and seeing what the mayor was doing to address climate change. It’s an important and personal issue to her, she said.
“It’s my future, it’s my life, it’s the world that I will be living in,” she said. “And it’s also important to me because I’m an avid outdoors enthusiast.”
It was an experience she’s grateful to have had.
“It hasn’t even totally hit me yet,” she said. “What I found to be really incredible is that I didn’t feel like I was intruding there, I felt like everyone there was really happy to hear what I had to say.”
Another member of the Youth Climate Action Council, Asha Muhingi, also joined McLean to meet Biden.
“Being a refugee, I’ve always strived to play an important role in building Boise, our state and our nation,” Muhingi said in a statement provided by the mayor’s office. “Meeting the president was an exciting step in sharing my commitment to this city and honoring the work we’re doing to make Boise an even better place to live.”
They weren’t the only students who got to see the president.
When Scott Hendrix, a teacher at Columbia High School in Nampa, heard Biden would be coming to Boise, he sprung into action.
He wanted to give a few of his students the opportunity to see the president — and maybe even get the chance to ask Biden a question of their own.
So, he put in a call to the White House, sent a message out to his students to see who would be interested and asked them what kind of questions they would ask the president if given the chance.
Then, he left the decision on who would get to go to his wife.
On Monday, two students from Columbia High got to be with the media at the airport to see the president fly into Boise on Air Force One.
Hendrix said the experience wasn’t quite as exciting as he had planned — the students didn’t get to ask questions of Biden — but he hoped the students took away from it that they could get these types of opportunities if they just ask.
One of the students he brought, Aurora Adamson, 15, said she wanted to go because she wanted to see the president and get the experience of being with the media. She wanted to ask the president about his priorities to address climate change and wildfires and how soon people might be able to see positive changes to the environment. She also wanted to ask about what people in the community can do to help.
“It was cool to see him in real life,” she said, “versus just seeing him on camera.”
Hendrix was hoping to tie the visit into what his students are learning. His class is reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and using it as a tool to discuss how to evaluate arguments and claims and learn about how messages are disseminated.
It wasn’t the first time he’s taken students to see a president. Back in 2005, he got to take a few journalism students to see former President George W. Bush when he was in Idaho.
“Things at that point were politically much different than they are now,” Hendrix said.
Although he faced some resistance from parents this time around for political reasons, his goal in bringing the students to see Biden, he said, was to give his students the experience of getting to see the president — regardless of the politics.
“My intention is not to push any sort of agenda,” he said. “Teachers don’t do that.”
This story was originally published September 13, 2021 at 5:16 PM.
