Janet Rivera always wanted a lot of kids.

“I always imagined a big dining room table with six kids sitting around it,” she said.

While fate may have given her only one biological child, life has given her more than 500. Rivera is the unofficial mom to the children at Washington Irving School in Sleepy Hollow, where she is a teaching assistant.

She comes to work early every day to make sure the kids in the cafeteria eat their breakfast. She readily gives out hugs and wipes away tears. She watches out for the children on the playground and makes them talk to each other if she sees they are not being nice.

“She treats all the kids at school like she was their own mom,” said school nurse Nancy Checchi. “She is one of the most selfless people I know.”

When Rivera finishes her day at Washington Irving, where she has worked for nine years, she goes to her second job at the RSHM Life Center afterschool program in Sleepy Hollow, where she helps children with homework.

“If the kids aren’t getting their homework done, most of the teachers know they just have to let Janet know,” said Checchi. “If parents aren’t responding to notes sent home, Janet will go knock on their door.”

A native of Puerto Rico, Rivera moved to the Bronx at age 27 with her four-year-old son and mother after a divorce and the death of father.

“I spoke no English, but I got a job my third day in New York, working at a day care,” she said.

Two years later she enrolled in Monroe College in the Bronx studying business administration, having learned English by watching television. Working by this time at a special education center in Manhattan, she also began babysitting for her employer’s three-year-old daughter in White Plains, something she continued to do until the child turned 15 last year.

“She’s one of mine!” said Rivera, beaming. Between school and home in the Bronx, and work in Manhattan and White Plains, Rivera was busy.

“My mom has been a hard working woman all her life,” said Rivera’s 20-year-old son Joshoan Lamourt. “She is my role model. She fought her way up and she taught me to never give up. Because of her, I am where I am now.”

Lamourt is finishing his junior year at Buffalo State College studying sports management. He remembers his mother spending her days off with him at a park near the Bronx Zoo and her reaction when he didn’t want to do his homework.

“She would keep me there until I was 100 percent done. She was tough,” he said.

That tough mom is now a tall, pretty woman of 44, whose smile lights-up the room at the Life Center, where first graders toil over reading and writing. “What’s the missing word in this sentence,” she asks one child. “Remember to say please” to another and “Oh, what happened here?” when a child holds up a finger with a bandage.

“It’s a long day, but I love it,” she said. “I get to work with kids. I remember them all. They are all mine.”

Rivera credits her own mother for much of her success.

“I have an excellent mother. She was always there for me. She always had the right words to say,” Rivera said, choking back tears.