Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the first former school teacher to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket in 50 years, brings a long resume on education issues to his new role as a vice presidential candidate.
Walz famously signed into law free school lunches for every student in the state and helped enact major budget increases for schools, moves that came decades after he coached a high school football team to a state championship and helped start his school’s gay-straight alliance.
“He’s a very strong supporter of public education, and that probably starts with his identity as a former teacher,” said Dan Hoefrenning, a professor of political science at St. Olaf College. “He begins as a teacher, and I think teachers are going to feel like they have a good, good colleague on the ticket.”
“I think for teachers, Walz is probably as good as it gets,” he added.
In the first 24 hours since Vice President Harris announced Walz as her running mate, her team raised some $36 million, her deputy campaign manager said, adding that the top profession among the donors was teachers.
Walz graduated high school in 1982, before enlisting in the Army National Guard. He got his bachelor of science in social science in 1989 and went abroad to teach in China for a year before returning to Minnesota to become a social studies teacher and a football coach at Mankato West High School.
“And supervised the lunchroom for 20 years,” the governor said on X last month. “You do not leave that job with a full head of hair. Trust me.”
He was asked to sponsor a gay-straight alliance at the school by students in the 1990s, no small request for a rural school at the time.
Read more at Thehill.com
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