Teachers Thrilled by Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’ Vice Presidential Candidate

Fatim Byrd knew little about Tim Walz until Vice President Kamala Harris selected him as her vice presidential running mate on Tuesday.

When Byrd learned of the two-term Minnesota governor, he quickly became excited: Walz spent two decades as a social studies teacher in public high schools, from the 1990s to 2006. He coached football and was the first faculty adviser for the Mankato West High School Gay Straight Alliance, a position he took after one of the first openly gay students at the school approached Walz and asked for aid. aid.

“He wasn’t a teacher for three years and then he left; he taught for 20 years,” said Byrd, a Spanish teacher at Strawberry Mansion High School. “He knows how hard this job is and hopefully he can get what we need.”

When someone pointed out on social media that Walz looked significantly older than Harris — they are both 60 — the Minnesota governor suggested he looked older because he had been a lunchroom clerk for 20 years.

Teachers unions have traditionally supported Democratic candidates — though less so when they support vouchers, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — so it’s no surprise that teachers support Harris-Walz’s candidacy.

But Harris’s choice of someone who went straight from the classroom to the Capitol and who initially ran for public office because he said he had a challenging time explaining decisions being made in Washington to his students energized teachers in a way that delighted Matthew Kay, an English teacher at Science Leadership Academy, a high school in Center City.

Matthew Kay identifies with Walz: Kay is fully committed to the life of a teacher, teaching, coaching football and basketball, and running the city’s slam poetry league, just as Walz taught, coached, and ran clubs. Kay is also married to a teacher, like Walz, whose wife, Gwen Walz, taught English for 29 years.

“I’m glad teachers are excited about it because there’s so much bad news,” Kay said. “When teachers are excited about something, we make a difference. We go out and do things.”

To wit: Kay always intended to vote, and vote against former President Donald Trump. But the teacherly energy Walz brings means he’ll certainly be motivated to volunteer to make phone calls for Harris and Walz in the weeks leading up to the election, he said.

Teachers also say they like that Walz is a real-world person: He doesn’t have stocks, but he does have a teacher’s pension. (And in 2007, interview for Education Week, shortly after being elected to CongressWalz said he feels prepared to juggle competing priorities because that’s what he did every day as a teacher, and “the most important thing here is that I actually get help. Obviously, with the budget cuts in education, we’re copying ourselves, we’re doing everything ourselves.”)

“I feel so good now”

Inez Campbell likes that Walz is a veteran — she also served in the military. And Campbell, a special education teacher at Willard Elementary in Kensington, was especially moved that as governor, Walz supported and signed a bill mandating free breakfasts and lunches for all studentswhich he sees as crucial, especially for students from low-income families like the ones he teaches. (Free breakfasts and lunches are already common in Philadelphia schools, given the city’s high rate of child poverty.)

“Free lunch for kids? Good for the environment? A lot of the things he’s done for his state have been really good; I don’t see anything wrong with him,” Campbell said of Walz. She had a bad feeling about President Joe Biden’s chances of defeating Donald Trump, “but now I have such a good feeling.”

In New Jersey, Anthony Angelozzi is also doing well. Angelozzi, who is a social studies teacher at Hammonton High and president of the Hammonton teachers union, is running for office himself.

“I have nothing against them, but politicians are mostly lawyers, entrepreneurs, maybe government bureaucrats,” Angelozzi said. “It’s so rare for ordinary people, ordinary people, to run for public office. We teachers just want to see ourselves in government.

“We are servants of society, just like politicians.”

Sally O’Brien, a teacher at Kensington Health Sciences, summed up her feelings about Walz in two words:

“Of course I do,” she said.

Molly Maldonado is aware that a teacher could become vice president in January.

“When you see on the ground what kids really need to thrive, you make a lot of decisions you wouldn’t make otherwise,” Maldonado said, citing Walz’s work to provide free lunches and free menstrual products to Minnesotans. “A lot of politicians are very arrogant, thinking they know what’s best for kids, and they really don’t understand what it means to be on the ground. But you see a microcosm of the population when you teach, and you say, ‘This is what we need to do for them.’”

Maldonado, a teacher at Philadelphia Virtual Academy, an online school in the Philadelphia school district, said teachers saw themselves in Walz, especially when he criticized Trump and his vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).

“That’s how a teacher would deal with a bully, someone who’s cruel just for the sake of being cruel. You point it out and say, ‘Stop being like that,'” Maldonado said.

(Walz, speaking Tuesday at Temple University’s Liacouras Center, told the crowd that Trump and Vance “are terrifying and, yes, just weird as hell.”)

Walz may be a bald dad, but Maldonado thinks he’ll catch her students’ attention.

“I’m a teacher of teenagers; I feel the pulse of where the young people are,” Maldonado said. “The young people were really excited about Harris — not all of them, but a lot of the young people. But Walz? He’s got that old-timey, daddy vibe to him, and they like that.”