In their classrooms, children learn about ‘New Hampshire’s Christa’ where her legacy speaks the loudest

At the start of each school year, Kimberly Bleier stands before a new crop of students taking her Street Law course at Concord High School and does not presume they know much about Christa McAuliffe.

Four decades have elapsed since the euphoria of McAuliffe’s selection as the Teacher in Space swept Concord. Even students at Concord High School who recognize her name may not know exactly who she was. Most don’t realize she taught there, according to Bleier, head of the school’s history department, and nearly all assume she was a science teacher.

Bleier dedicates time to that conversation. She points out the classroom in which McAuliffe taught and discusses the courses she created. She tells them that McAuliffe, who would be 77 today, was “groundbreaking in her time here.”

Mainly, she directs her students’ focus not to the tragedy that ended McAuliffe’s life but to the legacy she left behind.

“Enough time has passed that we no longer live in a world where everyone comes here and just knows that this is where she worked. Now is the time to re-examine and reframe the conversations we have to honor her in our community,” Bleier said. “I really want to look at what made her so extraordinary, the impact she had, her love of learning and students and history.” 

Christa McAuliffe boarded the Challenger space shuttle with six other crew members on Jan. 28, 1986. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight. Forty years after the ill-fated mission, her passion for education and championing of ordinary people have persevered. Her memory is alive wherever troubled students receive understanding, textbooks are traded for personal histories and educators regard the world as an extension of their classrooms.

McAuliffe’s philosophy of teaching still pervades classrooms at Concord High. 

The teacher in space, who would have orbited the globe filming lessons from the Challenger, insisted on encouraging her pupils to think beyond the confines of the classroom. Her economics students researched how construction projects impacted Concord, while her American history students sought out records of people who lived through each decade of the 20th century in the capital city.

She chaperoned her students to courthouses where they could observe the turning gears of the legal system, an approach Bleier honors in form and spirit with her Street Law curriculum.

The class might have been unrecognizable to McAuliffe before Bleier picked it up more than a decade ago. Over the years, it had morphed into a deep academic study of Supreme Court cases that neglected practical learning. Now, students look forward to visiting the federal courthouse to perform mock sentencing hearings with Judge Landya McCafferty before watching her preside over the real thing. Souvenirs from class visits to the New Hampshire State Prison — candy dishes crafted by inmates from repurposed license plates — line the walls of Bleier’s office. 

Street Law, she said, has become the third most popular elective among the school’s nearly 1,500 students.

“We have this amazing, rich community filled with law professionals. We have more courthouses in Concord than anywhere else. We have more law offices than anywhere else. We have a prison here,” she said. “There’s so much value in seeing things with your own eyes and making your own value judgment and assessment. We give them the tools to formulate their opinions — it’s not my job to tell them what to think but to give them all this information so that they can become informed citizens.”

‘I touch the future. I teach.’

Virginia Drew contends with the weight of introducing young students to Christa McAuliffe almost every day of the school year. 

In the halls of the State House on a Thursday morning in early January, she distilled the legislative process for a group of fourth-graders from the Gilmanton Elementary School. 

Imagine a tax on candy bars, she prompted. “What if you really like candy bars? Maybe Logan creates an amendment that taxes only purchases of 10 candy bars or more,” she said, plucking one boy out of the restless single-file line.

The fourth-graders from Gilmanton, two classes totaling 35 students, buzzed at their distinction as the first cohort to tour the State House in 2026. They reviewed other notable firsts with Drew as their knowledgeable tour guide: New Hampshire sent the first American astronaut into space, Alan Shepard, from Derry. New Hampshire, second to none, holds the first presidential Republican primary. On January 5, 1776, New Hampshire became the first colony to adopt a constitution.

And New Hampshire, Drew explained to the children gathered under a towering bronze statue of Christa McAuliffe, had the honor of being selected to send the first teacher to space.

Fourth-graders like to deal in concrete information. Drew hosts thousands of students from across New Hampshire each year and fields their every question: What grade did McAuliffe teach? How long did it take for her to go through training? She explains the significance of the statue of McAuliffe outside, the first statue of a woman on the State House lawn and the first statue many kids can connect to their personal lives.

Children see plenty of eternalized statesmen. To witness the bronze likeness of a teacher, however, stands out.

“Connections to history make it much more meaningful. For the kids in Concord and the kids in New Hampshire, it’s about knowing that Christa was a New Hampshire person, one of ours,” Drew said in an interview. “We talk about things like the first American in space, and then we say the first teacher in space, and it’s a sensitive thing because we celebrate Christa’s adventures, but we also mourn what happened.”

From the State House lawn, the children paraded inside to the visitor center, where they faced a wall crowded with campaign memorabilia like a graffiti-covered underpass of buttons, bumper stickers and MAGA hats. The center is a treasure trove of collectibles. A gaggle of pony-tailed girls surrounded a display case where four pieces of moon rock are preserved. One child recognized an illustration of McAuliffe teaching at Concord High School from a poster near the gym at Gilmanton Elementary.

Fourth-grader Bentley Ward stood transfixed, observing a Revolutionary War diorama with friend Mason Minery. He pressed his finger against the glass and pointed to a figurine: “Look at George Washington!”

Standing under the statue of McAuliffe outside “made me feel happy,” he said.

The statue, and the window of opportunity to speak to children about Christa McAuliffe, meant more to chaperone Susan Hoodlet, a paraprofessional at the elementary school. She was at home in Gilmanton feeding the youngest of her two children when she saw the Challenger explode in a spiral plume.

She had never met McAuliffe — she was a few years older than Hoodlet and had attended a girls’ parochial school, not the public high school in Framingham, Mass. — but McAuliffe was a legendary figure in their shared hometown.The sight of the statue reminded her of the monumental weight of McAuliffe’s life.

“She got picked. Just think of how big that is,” Hoodlet said.

The exuberance of McAuliffe’s selection as the first Teacher in Space, and the devastation of her loss, are represented in time capsules from the past that Drew invites every fourth-grade student in New Hampshire to share in when they step through the doors of the State House.

“Just imagine over 10,000 teachers all over America who applied to be the first teacher in space, and when it finally came down to the choice, it was New Hampshire’s Christa. Now, it ended in a disaster, but it is really important to remember how brave she was,” Drew said.

An ordinary person with a lasting legacy

Bleier was just older than the state’s fourth-graders when McAuliffe first entered her consciousness.

She was 11 years old in 1986, a sixth-grader at the Conant School, later known as Abbot-Downing, whose babysitter was a highschooler in one of McAuliffe’s classes. She knew nothing of the national theater surrounding McAuliffe’s flight; rather, she marveled at the substance of the woman who daily graced her television screen. After school, she would sit with her father and clip newspaper articles about McAuliffe’s training at NASA to add to her scrapbook.

“It was the human story. Here was this woman, this brave, amazing woman who was well loved by everybody who knew her, that was going on this adventure — this ordinary human doing this extraordinary thing.”

By the time Bleier became a teacher, the project-based learning that McAuliffe had championed at Concord High was no longer a novelty — she’d learned about hands-on teaching in her methods classes at UNH, but that wasn’t the standard approach in the 1980s.

As a social studies teacher at Concord High, McAuliffe challenged students in innovative ways. She hoped students would leave her class “with strong democratic ideals and the tools to be useful citizens,” she wrote in her Jan. 1985 application to the Teacher in Space program.

Her landmark curriculum, a course titled ‘Herstory,’ provided a semester-long examination of American history through the personal lives and reflections of ordinary women. Forty years later, the history department still offers her class to students, with the addition of other historically excluded perspectives, like those of Indigenous women.

Rummaging through the department’s book closet, Bleier recently found a book from which McAuliffe would have pulled excerpts to assign her students. A stamp dates the title by Joanna Stratton back to 1984: ‘Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier.’

McAuliffe identified with the chorus of women whose histories were recorded in books like Stratton’s: “Just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals, I, as a pioneer space traveler, would do the same,” she proposed in her application.

“She did that at a time when women were not yet a focal point of history, they were a footnote,” Bleier said. “The whole design of that course is the idea that the average citizen played an important role in history, and now the person who created that curriculum has become an average person who played an important role in history.”

This story is part of our series, ‘Christa’s Legacy: Concord’s pioneer woman, the world’s teacher. To read more visit www.concordmonitor.com/christas-legacy.

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