Alison Zampino, Dean of Students, walks into the Venetia Valley K-8 School office with a 6-year-old, immediately noticing four other student and teacher disputes that need her assistance. “Hey, Ms. Zampino, can you help me over here when you’re done with that?” she hears. “Zampino, they need you over there.”
That all happens in five to ten minutes of Zampino’s typical day.
Working around kids wasn’t always something she always wanted to do.
Zampino worked at a lawyer’s office, thinking that was what she wanted to be. After a couple years of walking around an office in high school, making copies and filing, angry bosses yelling about different things, and being around stressed co-workers, she decided that being a lawyer wasn’t for her.
She then realized that she wanted to work with kids, though she didn’t really know what that meant. So she went to college and got a degree in psychology and started volunteering for CASA, an organization that trains volunteers to advocate for children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned from 2005-2015. Next, from 2005-2006 got a job at a group home but didn’t really like sleeping under the same roof as the kids. She then found a job at Oaks Children’s Center, a non-public school for special education students who need more services than what a public school can give them.
She enjoyed this, although still she wanted to see what it would be like to work at a different kind of school, so she went to graduate school to get her master’s degree in counseling psychology in hopes of becoming a school counselor. In 2010, San Francisco provided her with an opportunity where she worked between the positions of a dean and a counselor, until she got pregnant and decided to take a break. After her pregnancy and the early childhood years of her daughter, she moved to Marin in 2019, where she became a counselor at SRHS before eventually working as the dean.
She first came to the beautiful, sunny, and warm Golden Gate Park in San Francisco from New Jersey, where she would sometimes endure three-day snow-ins during the winter break of her senior year in college, a trip that was a huge step in Zampino’s path. Growing up in her small town of “30 familiar faces,” nobody had ever been to California, and Zampino fell in love with it so much that she almost didn’t go back to college. After finishing college in 1996, she decided to move to California. She moved in with her best friend and brought Jersey to San Francisco.
“A lot of what I want to achieve with my work is making people feel safe and comfortable at school and helping students feel like they are part of the community,” says Zampino. She sees these aspects of interaction as a very important part of her work because when you find a group or people you feel a part of you feel better and if someone feels disconnected from school and those who surround them. That’ll be reflected in their academics and behavior.
Peter Wolfgram, a counselor at SRHS who has known Zampino since 2011 says Zampino, “sees the good in people no matter what they may be going through, making her an easy person to talk to like a counselor at heart.”
According to Zampino, “being a counselor and a dean are two pretty different positions to work in.” She describes being a dean as a “reactive position” and says that, “While being a dean, you’re not ever really in charge of your day. You follow tasks, try to create systems, and follow up on things that have already happened. But if a whole new situation comes up, you’re going to have to deal with it.”
“I think she’s an interesting dean because she knows you have to build a relationship with kids and shows how she really cares about them and wants them to have opportunities after high school. I think she’s a great fit as a dean,” Wolfgram says.
She has worked at all levels of education from elementary school to high school. She figured out last year, working at Miller Creek Middle School, that she really likes the middle school age, and she finds it easier than the elementary aspect as the Dean of Students at Venetia Valley. Not having worked with younger kids in a while, she says she just needs to get used to them again. “You have to learn the different systems, personalities, and the different and appropriate ways to discipline a middle schooler and a second grader, and having to go back and forth with that all day can be challenging,” she says.
Though she did enjoy working at a high school, and she loved SRHS, she just hit a point where she was burnt out by high school life. She feels like she’s worked in high schools for so long, both in the city and Marin. She wasn’t enjoying the work she was doing anymore; she felt it wasn’t inspiring her and she craved something new, something different.
Having worked in education for so long, she’s seen and gone through a lot of difficulties, of which is when she loses students. Kids who have worked really hard but end up in the wrong place at the wrong time are hard things to watch as someone so involved in the school community. But the thing she enjoys the most about her job is watching students get through a struggle and succeed, no matter how small it is; It’s what keeps her going.
Wolfgram also says, “You have some kids that if you ran into in the street, most folks may be scared but that does phase her and they loved her because she was real and they knew that she cared about them it for her it wasn’t just “Oh I have authority over you, you’re going to do what I say” and they knew that too.”
Being a dean to her is much more than teaching kids discipline. She’s someone who cares about her students’ individualities and sees past their flaws. She prioritizes care, gaining students’ trust, and helping students take ownership of their education and personal growth, making her the dean and counselor she is.
