From humble beginnings to a life focused on education
Gerry Kleisinger set to retire after 37 years on Catholic school board
Seventy years ago, Gerald (Gerry) Kleisinger couldn’t have guessed he’d spend his life in education. School was a place he never liked to be.
Kleisinger was a dyslexic eightyear-old “ragamuffin,” kicked off the hockey team for refusing to play goal.
Then he fell in love with Mrs. Emily Woodward, with her radiant smile and pink angora sweater, at the Prince of Wales Library on 14th and Broder.
“She said to me, ‘Do you read?’ And I lied; I couldn’t read.”
When she signed him up with a library card, he picked the biggest book he could find to impress her — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, coincidentally banned by the church.
So the “east end ruffian” went home, looked up every fourth word in the dictionary, and taught himself to read.
In the next few years, he read every book in that library. “I just devoured them.”
After elementary school at St. Joseph, Kleisinger attended high school at Campion College, where the Jesuits drilled into him the need to serve and give back. And he did. Next week, Kleisinger hangs up his hat after 37 years on the Regina Catholic school board in a 46-year span. (He took nine years off for city council, on which he served two terms before losing his third race in 1988.)
He laughed — staccato, hearty and infectious — at the suggestion he needs a break. “That’s the understatement of the year.”
Kleisinger’s reasons for retiring are honest. At 79 years of age, “There’s things that I think are important; I’m obviously not going to get them done; I’m not going to be able to influence them,” he said. “I strongly believe that we’re educating our children for the 20th century, not the 21st century.
“Of course I’m older, but I still look at them and I say, ‘You need something else.’
“We do a pretty good job with what we have; you can only do so much with the resources that you have,” Kleisinger added. “But there are so many changes, systemic changes, that have to take place in education and I don’t see that I can influence that anymore.”
He stayed on the school board for so long because he loves solving puzzles and problems, “and education is one of the biggest ones.”
Kleisinger’s time as a teacher was short-lived. After studying geology and geography at the University of Minnesota, then earning his teaching certificate in Saskatchewan, he spent four years at St. Augustine and St. James schools.
In 1968, he received his master’s degree in educational psychology, which became his passion — “working with young children and helping them and the teachers design their program so that they could be successful.”
During his years on the school board and city council, Kleisinger worked as an educational psychologist with the Regina Rural Health Region, the Department of Education and the Saskatchewan Alcohol Commission.
“I couldn’t keep a job,” he joked, again laughing that big laugh.
But really, Kleisinger was following his own advice: “Grab every opportunity that comes your way.”
His years on the school board, though, he credits to the citizens of Regina. “Servant leadership, people see that as a task. It’s not. It’s a gift that anybody would even entrust that to you and let you do that,” Kleisinger said. “That’s one thing that I’ll be forever grateful, with all my warts and shortcomings and everything else, that the people in Regina let me do that.”
Looking back on his decades with the Regina Catholic school board, the main things that stand out to him are “how fortunate our children are” to have a publicly funded education system, the “excellent” and “dedicated” teachers, and the commitment to giving “as much as we possibly can give” to indigenous and disadvantaged children.
We do a pretty good job with what we have; you can only do so much with the resources that you have.