Former students and colleagues recall high school teachers Tim and Gwen Walz as allies and advocates

MANKATO, Minn. (AP) — Jacob Reitan said he told Gwen Walz he was gay before he told his parents.

Reitan was a student in 1999 at Mankato West High School in Minnesota, where Walz and her husband, Tim, were teachers. In her classroom, Gwen Walz had announced at the start of his sophomore year that her class was a safe place for gay students.

“I’d never heard a teacher ever talk about gay issues from the front of the classroom,” recalled Reitan, now a 42-year-old lawyer in Minneapolis. “That act meant the world to me. It made me feel welcome in the place where I’m supposed to learn.”

Gwen Walz’s unwavering support was shared by her husband, who moved to Minnesota from rural Nebraska long before the Democrat became a congressman, governor and Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice to be her running mate in her 2024 presidential campaign.

It was Tim Walz whom Reitan approached about starting a Gay-Straight Alliance at the high school. Having the backing of the football team’s defensive coordinator — a straight, married man and soldier in the Army National Guard — gave the plan a boost.

Walz, a world geography teacher, offered to be the group’s faculty adviser. That mattered, Reitan said, to a young man who had had his car window broken and a gay slur scrawled on his family’s driveway.

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