Education Advocate
Ann Allison Vitkus earned her UNC degree during the tumultuous ’60s. The experience launched a strong banking career and turned on her commitment to supporting education programs.
| By Mary SasakiAnn Allison Vitkus’ story is more than a tale of two very different cities, Greeley and Chicago. It’s a tale of transition, from a teen in a conservative Greeley family to an active participant in the Chicago business community and Democratic Party. It’s also a coming-of-age story, set in a politically charged era characterized by a controversial and unpopular war, the Woodstock generation and immense cultural change.
Ann graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 1968 with a Spanish degree during what she calls a “time of incredible upheaval.” She achieved fluency in Spanish, a language she began studying in grade school, at the same time she adopted a new world view. The experience transformed her into a successful businesswoman who demonstrates her ongoing commitment to education by supporting UNC’s Cumbres Program, which prepares students to teach Spanish.
Before that, in 1965, Ann began college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She describes a “very strange transition” during her freshman year at CU: from a child in a “Father Knows Best” era of relative calm and peace to a culturally aware young adult influenced by the Vietnam War.
“Every preconceived notion about life went out the window that year,” Ann says. “The war changed everyone’s feelings and began the polarization of liberals and conservatives.” When she arrived on the CU campus, she remembers, “women wore skirts and led an old-fashioned conservative existence.” By her sophomore year, life had done a back flip. “It was an interesting time,” she recalls. “People were demonstrating on campus, and women were wearing jeans.” That’s when she began the transition from CU to UNC, thinking she would pursue teaching. She traveled back and forth between the two schools, carrying 24 credit hours each term and juggling CU’s semesters with UNC’s quarters.
While CU Spanish professors were intelligent and prolific in their writing, she says, “they were not as interesting or inspiring as the teachers in Greeley.” She especially remembers a Cuban refugee teaching at UNC who included students in his family dinners and led fascinating discussions in Spanish.
Ann graduated from UNC after spending six months in Salamanca, Spain. “What a wonderful way to experience Spain,” she says. “I attended the oldest university in Western Europe and studied literature by writers who once attended the school. I became fluent in a short time.”
Asked by her mother, Frances Dorothy Gilbert, what she would do with a Spanish degree, Ann didn’t have a good answer. “All I knew was teaching or translating at the United Nations,” which, she adds, was limited to native speakers. “I loved Spanish, but I knew teaching wasn’t my forte.” This set the stage for a unique professional journey.
Cumbres Creates Leaders
Pupils across Colorado are learning Spanish from uniquely prepared teachers, thanks in part to the UNC Cumbres Program in the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences. Program Director Linda Carbajal says the vision of Cumbres (“peaks” in Spanish) is “to prepare classroom teachers to be role models and leaders in the field of education. That means they’re adept at working with students at risk of not succeeding in school, with children for whom English is not their first language, with minorities and with those living at the poverty level.” Founded in 1997, the program has a current enrollment of more than 140 students with a cumulative grade point average exceeding 3.2 on a 4.0 scale.
What makes Cumbres different from the UNC College of Education as a whole is that in addition to a Colorado teaching endorsement, students must also obtain an endorsement in bilingual instruction and/or English as a Second Language.
“We provide the ‘cream of the crop’ for Colorado schools,” Carbajal says. In addition to traditional teacher-education skills, graduates of the program develop leadership skills and tools needed to serve at-risk children. Each student must complete a leadership project before graduation. The Cumbres Program places 100 percent of its graduates who obtain teacher and ES L endorsements, according to Carbajal. In fact, some receive five to eight job offers. The program is unable to fill all requests for Cumbres graduates, who are in high demand by Colorado schools.
As director, Carbajal is responsible for recruiting students, promoting the program and raising funds to sustain it. Her goal is to recruit students with strong potential who will accept leadership training and mentoring. To recruit potential students, she visits college fairs and high schools, and she connects with organizations that can contact students who meet the program’s criteria. After the students are enrolled, “we work hard to keep them in school,” she says.
“Without the Ann Allison Vitkuses of the world, we wouldn’t be able to function,” Carbajal says. “Ann has been very generous and supportive of the program, and it’s her way to support high-quality teacher preparation while honoring the memory of her mother,” Frances Dorothy Gilbert who lived in Greeley more than 50 years.
In addition to private donors such as Ann, funds to support the program and its $1,500-per-student annual scholarship come through the UNC Foundation and state scholarship funds through the university.
If you would like to contribute to the Cumbres Program, contact Michael Muskin, 970.351.1408 or michael.muskin@unco.edu.
Influences and Inspirations
Ann made professional use of her Spanish fluency, working in Chicago for Avianca Airlines and Mexicana Airlines as a reservation agent and later a tariff expert. She lived with her then-husband and daughter in Spain for three years in the late 1970s. When they returned to Chicago, she entered a graduate paralegal program where she studied taxes and estate planning. After working as a paralegal, she became a vice president/senior trust administrator at Northern Trust in Chicago. During her final years at Northern Trust, Ann honed her teaching skills as a mentor of young professional women. She became an advocate and role model for women who entered the conservative, male-dominated world of banking, and she taught financial preparedness and estate planning seminars for women.
Her choice to study Spanish and international experiences influenced her political views as well. Ann found herself on the opposite political aisle from her conservative father, Greeley native and lifelong resident Robert M. Gilbert. “College was a time that certainly changed my political views,” she says. Today, her political leanings haven’t changed, and she remains active in the Democratic Party. She became a supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign after hearing him speak in Chicago.
Although she didn’t subscribe to her father’s political ideals, Ann attributes her work ethic and ultimate success to both parents, and her professional inspiration to her father, a lawyer who became president of what was then First National Bank of Greeley. He also served on the UNC Foundation Board of Directors and the University of Colorado Board of Regents. “His encouragement wasn’t exactly in words,” she says. He led by example. “It’s the journey, not the goal,” she remembers him saying. “You didn’t work just for the goal of earning money, but to enjoy your work. I’ve tried to feel that way about everything I’ve done.”
Inspiration and encouragement also came from Ann’s mother. Frances Dorothy Gilbert was born in Sidney, Neb., and attended the University of Nebraska for two years before she had to quit due to her father’s illness during the Great Depression and the family’s inability to pay for college. Her mother moved to Greeley where she worked as a power company secretary and met Robert. “They were married more than 50 years and were very happy,” Ann says.
Other key influences were Ann’s Spanish teachers, including those leading an experimental Spanish program in which she participated. “I was encouraged and inspired by my high school teacher, Lynn Sandstedt, to make Spanish my major in college,” she says. Sandstedt went on to become a longtime UNC Spanish professor who was a national leader of language organizations, including the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, the Joint National Committee for Languages, and the National Council for Languages and International Studies.
Ann’s daughter, Tiffany, now married with two children, also motivated her to succeed. “She kept me going when life seemed tough and made me learn to listen and not judge. She sometimes painfully made me look in the mirror.”
Finally, she gained strength not from a person, but a passion — running — which Ann began when she was divorced from her first husband in 1987. “I had minor asthma and allergies as a child,” she explains, “and to find that I could overcome physical hurdles, set goals and accomplish them was enormously liberating. I began doing marathons, many international, and eventually completed 17. It made me realize that I could do the same in my professional life.” She still runs a few miles each day. After being single almost 16 years, she married Chicago lawyer Richard Vitkus in 2004, and she retired in 2005. They now split their time between Chicago and Naples, Fla.
Ann’s education not only prepared her to be a successful banker, but an active volunteer in the Chicago community. She has worked for several nonprofit groups: the American Heart Association of Metropolitan Chicago; Youth Guidance, a program that provides counseling for students in high schools known for gang activity; and the Library of International Relations, which is associated with the Illinois Institute of Technology. She helps raise money for the library that electronically houses United Nations treaties and other important international documents.
Despite her wide range of interests, Ann is most proud of her volunteer work focused on educational support and advancement. “Education is the answer to the world’s problems — the way forward and the way out,” she says. She worked with Northern Trust and the Chicago Tribune Co. to found a nonprofit literary group, the Heartland Literary Society, which was named for the Heartland Literary Prize awarded to authors annually by the Tribune Co. The group sponsored authors to speak about their books to audiences that often included chief executive officers. “The only way to improve schools is to get the CEOs involved.” Ann is proud that the society’s popular meetings bolstered the book club trend in Chicago.
Ann is equally proud to support UNC’s Cumbres Program (“peaks” in Spanish). “I support the Cumbres Program because it’s geared toward helping prepare young adults to teach Spanish,” she says. “I’m glad to see UNC take an active role in that.” She also gives to UNC because “state schools are at the whim of state legislatures for funding,” thus limiting their ability to expand. When budgets are tight, she adds, “education often gets the short shrift.”
Her involvement with Cumbres fits her desire to bolster education programs, not buildings. “I’m not a bricks-and-mortar donor, and I don’t want my name on a building. What’s really important is to provide scholarships.” When her father turned 75, Ann established a scholarship in his name at the CU law school, primarily for older female students who might not otherwise be able to attend law school. “He loved the fact that I did that,” she says. Her Cumbres support is given in the name of her mother, who wanted to be a teacher, but was unable to finish college. “I didn’t know that until after she died,” Ann explains, and this is an appropriate way to recognize her mother’s inspiration and sacrifice.
Ann says she gives to UNC because the need is huge, the cost of education is rising more than inflation every year, and there’s simply no way for colleges and universities to maintain outstanding teachers and high-quality programs without private funding. “I’ve been fortunate in my life and my career,” she concludes. “My parents left a legacy, and this is my way of paying back, of keeping them alive.”