For more than 20 years, Dr. Diane Reese has been helping students in some capacity related to school counseling, whether that be as a counselor, coordinator or director of school counseling.
For the past five years, she has served as an assistant professor of counseling at Trinity Washington University, where she has been busy training the next generation of counselors. And as the nation celebrates National School Counseling Week, Reese’s current and former students — and those in the counseling profession — are praising Reese for her commitment and contributions to the field.
“She saw my commitment for wanting to give back to the community, give back to where I was from, especially when it comes to affecting African American males and males of color just in general, she definitely continued to push and drive me to be the best school counselor that I could be,” said Marcell J. Brown, a school counselor in the D.C. public schools. “She was constantly providing me with knowledge, skills and definitely always advocating for me the best way that she could.”
Brown was one of Reese’s students at Trinity, where he studied school counseling with a focus on urban students.
A nationally certified counselor, Reese joined the Trinity faculty in 2016 after years of working in the trenches.
“I started out as a juvenile probation counselor,” Reese said in an interview with Diverse. “I saw a lot of Black boys being referred and going through the court system. So I did a lot of work with them to keep them out of the [juvenile] facilities. And then, I started seeing a number of young Black females starting to come to me through the juvenile justice system.”
Prior to joining the academy, Reese spent time working as a youth services program specialist in Alexandria, Virginia, and eventually rose through the ranks.
