EDEN, Idaho — The farmland faces a skinny stretch of Hunt Road, rural fields that barely resemble the sagebrush-ridden piece of desert where Charles Coiner learned to drive as a teenager in southern Idaho.

The state senator, a Republican from Twin Falls, grew up about 15 miles away from the site where Japanese-Americans were detained behind five miles of barbed wire during World War II, living in tarpaper-covered barracks at the Minidoka Relocation Center compound.

"Even driving by here as a kid," Coiner said, "nobody talked about it."

Coiner revisited the site last month with a group of Centennial High School students on a field trip, the culmination of several weeks the students spent studying the World War II interment camps such as Minidoka.

They found a broken-down root cellar and a few barracks, the remnants of one of the darker chapters in Idaho history, as the state hosted one of the largest of the 10 camps the U.S. government built to detain Japanese-Americans during the war.

Coiner is among those supporting early efforts by the Friends of Minidoka nonprofit group to bring a comprehensive history of the World War II internment camp into Idaho public schools.

As of now, students are being taught little, if anything, about the history of the site and what took place there, said Friends of Minidoka board member Steve Thorson.

"There isn't a broad understanding of what happened," Thorson said.

The camps were created after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, declaring the West Coast a forbidden zone to those with at least one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry.

The organization was founded six years ago to preserve the history and advance awareness of the Minidoka site, which held an estimated 10,000 Japanese-Americans at one point and was designated a national monument in 2001.

But the initiative to build a statewide curriculum based on the internment camp history, a proposal the Idaho Department of Education has agreed to consider and which former detainees support, could be complicated because the development of the monument is still in early stages.

Plans for a visitor center at Minidoka are targeted for 2010, said National Park Service education specialist Annette Rousseau.

"That's one of the difficulties of going out there," Rousseau said. "There's not a lot to see."

The agency is also working with various historical societies to preserve the memories of the surviving Minidoka detainees, also a difficult task.

In the decades following their release, many Japanese-Americans remained largely silent about their experience in the camps, which operated in the western United States, Hawai'i and Arkansas between 1942 and 1946.

"There was almost nothing about this in the history books," said Robert Sims, a Boise State University emeritus professor who researched the camps.

Nick Wassner, a 14-year-old from Boise, was among the Centennial High School students who visited the Minidoka site in May along with his mother, Andrea Wassner, 45, who grew up in California and learned from an early age about the Manzanar internment camp, north of Los Angeles.

Her son stood on the concrete base of a former warehouse at the Minidoka camp and said he didn't know anything about the site before his class began its project.

"Romeo and Juliet, yeah, that stuff you have to learn," he said. "But this stuff hits home a lot better."

The program Centennial High School teacher Gena Marker designed prompted the Friends of Minidoka to pitch a statewide version. Thorson said his proposal could be modeled after a similar curriculum adopted in Washington state.

Densho, a Seattle-based nonprofit founded to preserve the history of the camps, was awarded a state grant last year to build the Washington state curriculum.

The teaching materials include videos and oral history lessons and are designed for elementary, middle and high school students. The materials meet statewide curriculum standards and are now available to Washington state teachers for use in the classroom, said Patricia Kiyono, a spokeswoman for Densho.

"We're working hard to market these pieces," Kiyono said. "There's an increasing demand."

The group is now creating Minidoka educational materials for the National Park Service, Kiyono said.

Thorson has plans to hammer out the details of a statewide curriculum with the Idaho Department of Education, such as how much implementation would cost and how it would fit in with current statewide standards for history education.

While the initiative is still taking shape, the initial steps to ensure students to know what happened to Japanese-Americans during the war are necessary, said Oregon resident Joe Saito, 90, who fought in the mostly Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team during the war.

Saito came to Boise last month to meet the Centennial High School students. Because he was in the military, he was never detained in the camps like his family and the woman he would later marry.

Teaching younger generations about what happened is the only way to ensure it never happens again, Saito said.

"It's part of our history," said Saito, "what one group of people in our country had to go through."

His wife, Nellie Saito, a petite woman born in Bellevue, Wash., was 19 when she arrived at Minidoka with her mother and six siblings.

Nellie Saito, now 86, said her family had two weeks to pack up their belongings before they were relocated to the arid southern Idaho desert, where they lived in barracks and worked on irrigation and farm projects.

"It was bad," she said. "We didn't know what to expect."