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It’s been said that when one door closes, another door opens. Chisago Lakes School Board Member Jerry Vitalis knows just how that works.

Vitalis of Taylors Falls,was honored recently by the MN School Board Association for 40 years of service on the Taylors Falls and Chisago Lakes school boards. The award was presented during a luncheon as part of the MSBA’s annual leadership conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Of school board members honored for their length of service that day, Vitalis’s tenure was the longest.

That’s remarkable in itself, but it’s only part of the story. What many people may not know is that Vitalis’s 40-year commitment to education sprang from a life-altering illness.

The son of a Swedish immigrant who came to America aboard the Lusitania in 1914, Vitalis was born and raised in Taylors Falls. In May 1954, Vitalis graduated from the old Taylors Falls School. Located on the hill behind the Folsom House, the building was known as “The School on the Rock,” says Vitalis.  He married, had four children and farmed for a decade.
Then, out of nowhere, illness struck.

“I started to get sick on May 5, 1965,” he recalls. Stricken by crippling arthritis, he quickly became incapacitated and could not work. “By July, I couldn’t eat because I couldn’t open my jaw,” he says.  Local doctor Dr. Leo Nelson referred Vitalis to a doctor at the University of Minnesota Hospital where Jerry underwent rehabilitation therapy and counseling.

“We lost everything…the farm, the house, everything,” says Vitalis. One door was closing, but another one was opening.  

No longer able to farm for a living, Vitalis qualified for retraining. The Minnesota Rehabilitation Fund paid for four years at the University of Minnesota, where he majored in elementary education, graduating in 1969.  
By chance, the former farm boy from rural Taylors Falls took a summer course on teaching in the inner city. Before he graduated, Vitalis was offered a teaching position. “I signed the contract to teach in the Minneapolis Schools before graduation,” he says.  

Vitalis and his family were living in Wyoming at the time. Each day he drove into the city to teach amid the classroom challenges of race, poverty and crime coupled with desegregation and bussing. During his 30-year teaching career, Vitalis worked with hundreds of youngsters at three inner city schools, Hall, Holland and Webster, and also supervised summer programs. Vitalis says that he most enjoyed teaching creative writing and encouraged students to share their thoughts and dreams on paper.

Not long after he started teaching, Vitalis divorced. He became a single dad, raising two boys and two girls, ages 6, 8, 12 and 14, on his own. Two years later, Vitalis married Connie, an orthopedic nurse whose husband died in Vietnam.

They added three boys to the family.

Jerry and Connie moved to Taylors Falls, where neighbors encouraged Vitalis to get involved in the Taylors Falls Parent Teacher Organization. He did, and a year later was urged to run for school board.

In April 1977, Vitalis was elected to his first three-year term on the Taylors Falls Shool Board. At his first school board meeting, Vitalis found himself interviewing three candidates for superintendent. He lobbied for hiring Superintendent Sig Rimestad and his 40-year career on the board of education had begun.

There were many challenges. Taylors Falls was a small k-12 school struggling to survive. “We were a landlocked district with no room to grow,” says Vitalis.

When Minnesota implemented open enrollment, Taylors Falls lost 15 students to Chisago Lakes. Attempts to merge with St. Croix Falls, WI, schools didn’t work out. In 1992, Taylors Falls proudly graduated is final class of 13 and the school district consolidated with Chisago Lakes district.

Consolidation was not the end of Vitalis’s school board career. Instead, he brought his17 years as a Taylors Falls School Board member, to the new nine-member Chisago Lakes School Board. The consolidation allowed for a gradual reduction in Board size, starting with three former TF Board members.  

He’s been continuously re-elected ever since.

“Chisago Lakes was very good about accepting Taylors Falls students,” says Vitalis.     “We always felt welcomed to the Chisago Lakes District.”

Vitalis retired from full-time teaching in 1999. At the time, he was serving as curriculum coordinator at Webster Open School—a school so diverse that the student population represented 21 different “home tongues.”
He isn’t done serving on the school board, and also isn’t done teaching. He still enjoys occasionally substitute teaching and instructing others as a Chisago County Master Gardener. Expect to see him at the annual Garden Expo at North Branch High School Saturday, March 4.

When asked how schools had changed during the past 40 years, Vitalis says it’s hard to answer “because almost nothing is the same.” Among the most significant changes, he feels, were federal mandates which require schools to provide services but that don’t provide adequate funding.

Vitalis points out that over 40 years on two boards of education he has served with only 29 school board members. It’s been a privilege, he says, to work with 29 of “the best people” who were devoted to education.

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