Guidance counselor Diane Giachetti retired in January

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Watsessing Elementary School guidance counselor Diane Giachetti, one of four Bloomfield School District educators to retire this year, ended her teaching career in January.

Giachetti’s decision not to wait until June was helped along by a long commute from Asbury Park, where she lives Giachetti received her BA in social work from St. Peter’s College and her master’s from NYU.

She began teaching as a physical education instructor at St. Aloysius, in Jersey City, and taught in the Bloomfield district on two separate occasions. She first spent five years on a child-study team in Bloomfield.

“This goes back a really long time,” she said recently in a Broad Street diner. “It was the ‘70s.”

She then went to St. Elizabeth, in Convent Station, where she was a director of counseling services for 14 years, and an adjunct professor of sociology and physical education. She then returned to Bloomfield and worked there until retiring. For a while, she worked simultaneously at Carteret and Watsessing elementary schools.

“At one point, a counselor had two schools,” she said. “Then a decision was made to put a counselor in each school.”

For the past four years she has been strictly at Watsessing. Even as a young girl, Giachetti figured she would be a teacher.

“At the time I was growing up, women didn’t have many options,” she said. “It’s not like it is today. I guess I always thought I’d do it.”

But she had a brother who taught and has a nephew who is a principal in Belleville.
“Truthfully, social work is my profession,” she said. “Social work and education have been my whole career. I can’t think of being anything else.”
Since she started, times have changed.

“It’s a different world,” she said. “Parents break up or get unemployed. Some kids are in a situation of neglect or abuse. Or the parents get arrested. There’s more domestic violence. The number of kids that are depressed or anxious has increased. There’s a lot of reasons we’re paying attention to it now. Kids have a lot of baggage.”

She acknowledged that these issues always had existed but they seemed more prevalent today.

“Generally, there is less respect for teachers than when I was growing up,” she said.“ A disrespectful kid can cause behavioral problems. And we may not get parental cooperation. Kids curse at teachers. If you call a parent, the parent may say, ‘Not my kid.’”

But Giachetti said she does not want to sound negative.
“A lot of the work going on now is emotional illiteracy — getting kids to understand their feelings,” she said.

She said a big part of addressing a student’s emotional problems is getting them to recognize that they are different from other students.

“When I see kids trying to make friends with kids that are different, that’s a big deal,” she said. “Of course, we want to develop a sense of competition, but we also want them to work together.”

Harassment, intimidation and bullying prevention take up a lot of time for a guidance counselor, too.

“Kids have to build their coping skills,” she said.”Talking out situations is challenging. In our layered culture, we’re not teaching self-respect.”
One problem confronting students, Giachetti believes, is the media.
“Reality shows and social media can have some mean-spirited aspects to them,” she said.

“I have said to kids that when you play a video game that is violent, you might think it is OK. It sort of desensitizes them to violence.”

At this point in the interview, a man from the next table interrupted Giachetti to tell her that she was wrong, that a child does not confuse real violence with make-believe violence. Once the man paid his bill and departed, Giachetti said his reaction was typical of parents.

“If I were to ask a parent about the violence their kid might see, the parent gets angry,” she said.

Giachetti said the culture does not support respect.
“It’s very hard to talk to a kid about empathy if disrespect is part of what they live,” she said.

One student she counseled came to her crying because his father had him watch a movie that was upsetting to him. The boy said his father mocked him for becoming upset at a movie.

When some of the students found out she was retiring, they cried. Giachetti said she did not want them to cry, but it showed that she meant something to them. One boy she remembered once told her he did not like her guidance lessons. But Giachetti said at least he knew it was alright to tell her that.

“Kids need to express themselves,” she said, “but they need help and they don’t always express themselves at home. I’ve had kids who would ask if they could talk to me, like about riding their bike in the park.”

After a pause, she added, “Sometimes I would watch parents pick up their kids at the end of the day,” she said. “The kids would be so excited, wanting to talk, and the parents would be on their cell phones or texting.”

Giachetti said the idea of retiring has been with her for awhile. She said the daily commute from Asbury Park was getting too stressful. Now, she will rest, make her own schedule, and read.

“And my dog is thrilled that I’m not working,” she said.