71 still teaching

Seventy-one-year-old Bob Saboe isn’t about to give up teaching.

Since retiring in 2001 after teaching math and science at Bonners Ferry High School for 38 years, Saboe has returned to Boundary County School District as a substitute teacher.

“It’s become kind of an interesting and fun thing to do for the most part,” said Saboe, who has been filling in for absent teachers for five years.

His interest in returning as a substitute teacher is appreciated by high school principal Curt Randall-Bayer.

“He can cover high- and low-end classes,” Randall-Bayer said. “He’s got a good personality and is a very well natured man.”

In addition to serving on a day-to-day basis, he once filled in for a high school chemistry and algebra teacher for nine weeks and a biology teacher for three weeks. Two weeks before the recent Christmas break, Saboe taught calculus and algebra for a week at the high school.

For the most part, he teaches one day during the four-day school week.

“I enjoy a lot of the kids and I think I’m relating to them, especially in my areas (of expertise),” Saboe said.

Saboe majored in chemistry and minored in math for three years at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. He graduated from Northwest Nazareth College in Nampa.  Saboe earned a master’s degree in chemistry with a minor in geology at the University of Idaho in Moscow.

Saboe is also a member of Gideons International and speaks at various churches in the county.

His first teaching job was in Kuna, Idaho, where for two years he taught everything from seventh-grade science to chemistry, physics, algebra and geometry. In 1963, Saboe moved to Bonners Ferry for a teaching job. He was hired to teach geometry and algebra. The follow year, he began teaching chemistry and later on, physics.

Saboe plans to continue substitute teaching. He is also active with the Senior Hospitality Center and serves as a substitute for the post office in Naples.