Glad to Help

John Lestino is the NASP School Psychologist of the Year

John Lestino ’82 has always had an interest in people. Specifically, he wants to know how he can help. He’s helped coach tennis campers at the YMCA and helped a school for orphaned boys grow its child development offerings. On one particular day, Lestino even patiently directed a slightly lost out-of-area visitor by phone, turn by turn, to his office at Magowan Elementary School in Edgewater Park, N.J., simply because it made things easier. 

Helping is Lestino’s thing, and for the past 20 years, he has helped the Edgewater Park School District counsel students with behavioral and mental issues, tailoring the best learning plans to suit their respective abilities. Now, the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) has decided to return that sort of patient dedication to Lestino, naming him the National School Psychologist of the Year.

“My father, who was a machinist at RCA in Camden for years, told me to always love going to work, and I’ve taken that to heart,” said Lestino, who is the school psychologist for the entire district, spanning kindergarten to grade 8. “Winning that award is very humbling, and incredibly exciting, and it says a lot about the breadth of impact you can have across a small district.”

Lestino studied political science as an undergraduate at Monmouth University, seeing government as the best vehicle to effect change. “I approached it as a way for me to help people – that’s always been my motive,” he said. “Eventually, in my case, I found that counseling and psychology were the draws.”

He volunteered with various youth groups and coached tennis at a YMCA camp in Monmouth County, N.J., and began taking education courses at Monmouth with an eye on teaching. “It ended up, though, that my mother had a stroke, and after that, I took off to California to visit some friends to refocus,” Lestino recalled.

While working construction, building houses in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Golden State, Lestino began reading about a counseling program back east at the former Glassboro State College, now Rowan University. “I noticed a way to work with counseling, while not actually being a certified teacher,” he recalled.

Lestino returned to New Jersey in the summer of 1972 and was accepted into the program shortly thereafter. “I was one of the few students in the program without a teaching certification, but I did have substantial substitute-teaching experience in Camden,” he said.

The completion of his master’s degree in Guidance and School Counseling at Rowan led Lestino to Girard College in Philadelphia, a place he says “changed my life.” The school, founded by an endowment from magnate Stephen Girard to the city in 1848, is not a “college,” in the traditional American sense, but a boarding school for students in grades 1 through 12 who come from families with limited financial resources and headed by a single parent or guardian. Founded as an academic, vocational and clerical school for orphaned boys, Girard still maintains what Lestino calls a “quasi-military approach, but I related well to the parents involved with this tried-and-true institution that that I knew could humanely support the children’s growth,” he explained.

What he figured would be about a two-year stay at Girard turned into 18, in part because Lestino was able to be a part of such sweeping progress, such as the addition of girls into the student body, the founding of a child study program and exploration of problems related to leaning disabilities. “I still did not have the formal title of school psychologist, though,” he said. Branching out, Lestino enrolled at Rider University in 1979 to study School Psychology, earning his degree in 1982.

After some years, Lestino’s friend Myron Lubin, who had earlier left Girard, began to speak to him about the Edgewater Park School District, and in 1988, Lestino interviewed with Joanne Kirby, the assistant superintendent of Curriculum, Guidance and Child Study, and now the district’s superintendent. 

“I have to say that the Girard experience was breathtaking, that feeling of making a difference in an orphaned child’s life,” he said. “But this district really allows me to have an impact. We have such a forward-thinking Board of Education, and I don’t like to miss a day.”

In addition to counseling students with mental or behavioral issues, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or other learning disabilities, Lestino provides in-service training to teachers, and early intervention and prevention regarding behavior issues that manifest with conflict. Bullying – more recently a hot-button issue in schools – is being dealt with aggressively in Edgewater Park because the districts’ curriculum features so much infused talk and content about diversity, respect and cooperation, Lestino believes.

“From the elementary-school level, our students are clearly taught how to deal with diversity and friendships, or even the lack thereof,” Lestino explained. ‘We’re all stakeholders in this district – every teacher, student and parent, so we’re always asking, ‘what can we do to make this better?’ We give them a voice, which gives them a better opportunity to have a stronger outcome.

It all adds up to results, and the National Association of School Psychologists has noticed. Back at Rider, the pride in Lestino’s achievements is evident. “This is a tremendous honor for John, as this award is given out to only one school psychologist annually in the United States,” said Dr. Stefan Dombrowski,professor and coordinator of the School Psychology Program at Rider. “Since John is a graduate of the program, it certainly brings greater visibility to the School Psychology Program. It is also coincidental that John won the award at the same time the program became nationally accredited by NASP, so the Rider University School Psychology program was really on the national radar in 2008.”

 

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