N.J. teacher of the year Kathleen Assini ready to take next step

As New Jersey's state teacher of the year, Delsea Regional's Kathleen Assini has had experiences she wouldn't trade.

Traveling. Shaking hands with President Obama. Spending time with inspiring educators from all over the country.

But when she returned to the classroom in September, it wasn't like coming back to toil after a fabulous vacation. It was coming home.

"It was neat being out among all those amazing people," Assini, 58, said, "but I feel more real and more me being with the kids."

That kind of dedication and passion was part of what got her named teacher of the year in October. Her term is winding down, but the hits have kept coming.

This summer, she became one of 39 educators nationally selected for a California Casualty Award for Teaching Excellence, given in conjunction with the National Education Association. As part of that program, she and her fellow honorees will travel to Peru in June.

Through early next month, Wells Fargo is honoring Assini as teacher of the year on hundreds of its ATM screens in New Jersey.

And probably in February or March, she plans to start working on her doctorate in education tuition-free through online Walden University, a scholarship that came with the state honor.

All of which is not too shabby for an educator who didn't start teaching until she was 45. As a girl, Assini wanted to be a teacher, but a discouraging instructor in high school and the prospect of college loan debt dissuaded her.

Instead, she went to beauty school. For more than 20 years, she did hair. Before that, she did a little bookkeeping. Over the years, she and her husband, Drew, had two children. She helped out at their school and loved it. So she started attending community college to get credits to be a teacher's aide. She kept on going, earning a bachelor's degree in social studies from Kean University while still working at the salon. She got her master's from Wilkes University.

As New Jersey teacher of the year, she got to travel to Arizona, Washington, Texas, and Alabama, where the group got to do space-travel simulation. She made useful contacts in New Jersey state government. She met past state teachers of the year and other educators who were teachers of the year in their own states.

"I felt like the mongrel pup at the Westminster Dog Show," she joked. "But they all felt the same. It was a very humble group."

Her sabbatical, which started in January, was an exciting, heady time, but she missed the students. When she was named teacher of the year, she was teaching eighth-grade history at the middle school and at the district's alternative high school. She visited the school a few times during her leave and even went to the eighth-grade dance.

But she wasn't worried about the students. She said she knew they were in good hands with her substitute, Courtney Tobin, a Delsea graduate who coached two district teams.

"She knew the kids, and they knew her," Assini said.

When Assini returned this month, she took a new job, teaching 21st-century skills, a technology-based course meant to build creative thinking, collaboration, and partnership. And she was happy that Tobin was hired permanently to do her old job.

"I didn't want the district to lose her," she said.

In a couple of weeks, the new state teacher of the year will announced. Between the doctorate she is going to start working on and studying Spanish for the trip to Peru, Assini still has a lot to look forward to.

It has been a year she will always be grateful for, she said, but she is back where she was always meant to be:

"Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, there's no place like home."