Vantaggi
Pay and benefits are great. *Most* of the teachers are awesome and are passionate about the work they do.
Svantaggi
Leadership is atrocious. Higher ups and most heads of school are just puppets for the higher ups. They don’t actually care for their employees or the families coming through the door. The company is run like it’s Amazon. None of the higher ups are qualified to work in education, they’re just there because they were once buddies the founder. Therefore, there is a huge disconnect between higher ups and those at the classroom level. They expect blind trust from staff.
There is also a huge distrust of qualified teachers. Everyone is micromanaged like crazy and there is little to no flexibility to teach how you want to. They claim it’s Montessori “inspired” but then won’t allow you to stray from the Montessori curriculum and add in that “inspiration”.
There are hardly any consequences for kids who are displaying undesired behaviors. You’re expected to basically talk it through with a child and if they’re still not behaving then oh well. I got written up once for asking a child to leave the group to go to the library because they were consistently disrupting an activity and redirection was not working. They don’t care that the education of the other kids in the class are being disrupted due to behavioral students.
On that note, there are little to no supports in place for kids who have special needs, and the school is not transparent about that. Especially with them cutting staffing in half, there will be even less of a capacity to handle kids with extra needs.
Kids are also not progressing academically. There is so much work to do and not enough time to do it, not to mention that half of the kids get “forgotten” about when it comes to curriculum because there are a bunch of kids with behavioral challenges that need 1:1 support. I was ashamed of the two classes I helped send off to kindergarten, as most of the kids were not prepared, could not recognize their names or numbers and had increasingly hard time with social settings.
The company does not appreciate pushback. When they introduce new policies (which they do, constantly.), they often ask for feedback. However, they do not actually want the feedback and will continue on with whatever plan they already had in place regardless of what staff say. If you don’t conform to the mould they want, they will show you the door.
Overall very disappointing place to work.