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.

But he said that is how Walz treated all students.

“He had the ability to talk about issues of bullying in a way that helped both the bully and the bullier,” Reitan said. “He made clear that bullying makes no sense. It doesn’t help anybody. And it made the school safer for me.”

In introducing Walz as her running mate, Harris shared that story. But Walz's advocacy for the LGBTQ community has not been met with universal approval in the days since he joined the ticket. Some Republican elected officials and conservative commentators have cited Walz's opposition to bans on gender affirming care for minors as proof that he is too liberal to be vice president.

Tiffany Justice of Moms for Liberty, a parental rights group that has pushed to restrict the discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools, contended in a recent interview with Fox News that Walz is “the most anti-parent candidate that Kamala Harris could have chosen.”

His approach stands in sharp contrast to actions taken in states such as Florida, Alabama and Iowa that have acted to restrict open discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Reitan said the high school's administration supported forming the club and that there was surprisingly little blowback. A few parents called and threatened to keep their kids out of school, he said, but the principal at the time simply replied that the school would mark those students absent.

Such criticism is rare among those who have spoken publicly about their experiences with Walz at Mankato West. Former students say Walz's classes felt like a bridge to the wider world.

“He made the world feel smaller and more approachable," said Nicole Griensewic, a student in Walz's geography class. “And so he would talk about China like it wasn’t so far away and it wasn’t so foreign.”

Griensewic's brother had been bullied, she said, but he felt comfortable enough with Tim and Gwen Walz that he joined them on an educational trip with other students to China.

“Dare I say, there’s a lot of toxic masculinity in the whole football realm,” she said. “And to see someone who was a football coach, but also saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to respect everyone. And I absolutely won’t put up with any of that crap.’ That was really bold.”

Adam Segar said Walz found a spot for him on the football team despite problems he had adding weight and muscle. Segar said that approach was commonplace with Walz — trying to make sure students and athletes who might not fit a traditional mold found a place.

“I think that’s what Tim brought to small-town America was, you know, the willingness to have an open mind and ask the students to make sure that they did too,” Segar said.

Ann Vote remembers Walz as an extrovert who was passionate not just about teaching kids, but learning from them. He supported her vision for a unique prom theme that was not included in the school vendor's premade prom kits and required nearly all the decor to be made by hand.

The theme was “In Our Wildest Dreams,” which, Vote joked, seemed to foreshadow Walz's trajectory.

When he subbed for one of her classes, he showed a video that he continuously stopped so he could excitedly explain various elements of it.

“He was just so passionate and engaged in what we were to be learning at a time when a lot of teachers put videos on to give themselves a break,” said Vote, who spent 12 years as a social studies teacher before becoming a motivational speaker. "Many of us at that school later became teachers.”

The curent high school principal, Sherri Blasing, did not teach with Walz, but she and her family lived next door to him for 22 years. When Blasing’s four children became teenagers, her family found themselves short on transportation. Walz gave them an old Buick they named “Laverne” that she said was a testament to Walz’s generosity.

“You see that common theme with Tim over and over again," Blasing said, "That he values every person for who they are, and he is going to do what he can to help them be the best that they can be.”

John Considine, an offensive lineman on the school's 1999 state championship team, had Walz for geography class. Considine would often cut his lunch break short to show up early so the two could chat.

In the late 1990s, before cellphones permeated campus life, Walz invented expressions that some students came to call “Mr. Walz-isms.”

One such Mr. Walz-ism that stuck with Considine was “11 to the ball.” The phrase called for cohesion among all 11 players on the football field.

Pat Ryan got to know Walz as a colleague while teaching speech and theater. Ryan was in on a faculty prank aimed at the newly hired Walz that did not quite go as planned. Thanksgiving was around the corner, and the veteran teachers gave Walz what appeared to be a certificate for a free turkey from a local grocery store.

The certificate was a fake, and the teachers waited outside the store ready to have a laugh at Walz's expense.

Instead, Walz emerged from the store with a free turkey. He said Walz won people over that way.

“That's how charming he is,” Ryan said. “You're going to have a hard time finding anyone who knows him and doesn't like him.”

For Reitan, the connection was more personal. But he believes everything he knows about Walz translates into the world of politics.

“He is so authentic. He is exactly what he seems to be,” Reitan said. “Tim Walz understands that being different is OK. Being different is part of the diversity of of the schoolyard and the classroom, but also part of the diversity of our nation.”

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Beck reported from Omaha, Nebraska.