District 35: Education-focused incumbent takes on ‘true conservative’ former lawmaker

Originally posted on IdahoEdNews.org on March 24, 2026

By: Kaeden Lincoln

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of candidate profiles Idaho Education News will publish ahead of the May 19 primary election. We’re highlighting competitive races impacting education policy. Click here to see our Elections webpage featuring a list of all candidates and much more. Click here to see your voter information. Follow our elections blog for breaking news and insights.

AMMON, Idaho — A first-term lawmaker and a former representative are on a collision course in District 35 — with different ideas about what should drive Idaho policy.

Incumbent Rep. Mike Veile is defending his seat against former lawmaker Chad Christensen in the upcoming Republican primary.

Veile is centering his campaign on education and collaborative policymaking, while Christensen is returning with a focus on law-and-order conservatism and support for school choice measures like Idaho’s new private school tax credit.

“One size doesn’t fit all for our kids,” Christensen told EdNews.

But Veile says he’s just settling in as representative of the district covering a large swath of Bonneville County and Teton, Caribou, and Bear Lake counties.

He hopes to continue focusing on education. 

“I just love getting in the middle of some of these bills,” he said. 

Gov. Brad Little appointed Veile to office last year after former Rep. Kevin Andrus was tapped by the Trump administration for a U.S. Department of Agriculture role.

As a former Soda Springs School District trustee, he said education tops his priorities if reelected — and he values including as many people as possible in the legislative process.

“I love sitting down in a room with different stakeholders and trying to get to a result,” he said.

This session, his priorities have revolved around several education-focused bills, including:

• House Bill 883, which gives state funding flexibility to districts that meet certain academic benchmarks.
• House Bill 712, which would create a state seal of excellence in civics to appear on high school diplomas for qualifying graduates.
• Senate Bill 1339, which Veile sponsored alongside Sen. Dave Lent, R-Idaho Falls, to create a requirement for school districts to adopt strategic performance improvement plans with measurable goals.

He finds charter schools innovative and a model Idaho public schools can learn from, but he worries they divide families between haves and have-nots depending on things like at-home support and special needs.

“We cannot turn our backs on those students,” he said of students with special needs. “They will become members of our society. It’s in all of our best interests to make them as successful as possible.”

He wants to increase special education budgets, especially in smaller districts, to support paying for things like speech pathology and to boost support for undertrained paraprofessionals.

Veile opposes private school tax credits. Idaho doesn’t have the funding to support multiple education systems, he said. He worries directing dollars to private schools reduces the effectiveness of money for public schools. 

He’s unsure what kind of funding model would solve problems in school budgets, but he doesn’t think it’s as simple as keeping the state’s average-daily-attendance model or even shifting to an enrollment-based approach.

“I think there’s other factors that are rapidly changing in how students do their learning through online avenues and things like that, which don’t make it an easy answer,” he said. “So that would be something that I think needs to be looked at differently.”

He believes Idaho is typically fiscally responsible, but some recent decisions unsettle him.

“Fiscal responsibility is also not passing costs on to our local governments,” he said about bills that impact property taxes. “I’m here to push bills that advance. I’m interested in making things better. I’m not interested in punishing.”

Christensen lost his House seat to former Rep. Josh Wheeler by 362 votes – a 4% difference – in the 2022 Republican primary. He withdrew the following cycle because he supported Andrus, who left for the Trump administration.

If elected, Christensen said he would prioritize issues of welfare recipient fraud and would seek harsher penalties for sex offenders, issues he focused on during his previous tenure in office.

His children once attended public schools, he said. But when his son suffered an ankle injury, he switched to an online school. The experience left Christensen feeling that public schools should be funded based on enrollment, rather than average daily attendance.

Education isn’t his primary focus, he said, but he supports school choice, public schools and career-technical education. He said he doesn’t want people to think he’s against traditional public school because he supports school choice.

“I support all education avenues,” Christensen said. 

Consolidating some school districts is an area he would like to explore, he said, as long as it is economically feasible. Consolidation proposals have gained traction in recent years, including in Vermont, where enrollment has shrunk in the last two decades.

Christensen expressed concerns about a lack of conservatism in the Statehouse. 

“The people in Idaho are conservative. I think the Legislature doesn’t mirror that,” he said.

He feels some representatives campaign on conservative platforms and then vote more liberally.

“I’m a true conservative,” he said.