Don't believe the fake planted reviews! - Teacher/Mentor Fusion Academy Employee Review

Fusion is, of course, privately owned, and at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line. In order to maximize revenue, Fusion should provide excellent service to its customers. As a school, Fusion provides the service of education to the customers, who are the students. If Fusion made the students as happy as possible, the school would get great reviews, and word-of-mouth would be enough to make Fusion very popular and successful in the areas where it exists. However, Fusion as a company has its priorities in looking good to parents, and will spend exorbitant amounts of money on catered events and little 'party favors' to hand out to people. What Fusion forgets is that a school's job is to provide a stellar education to their students. Who are the service providers? The teachers. By pouring all of their income into inane events for parents, showing off to professionals, and absurdly rapid expansion of the company, with new campuses opening up every few months... This leaves the teachers extremely underpaid, and overlooked by corporate. That's one reason why teachers are unhappy, which compromises the quality of the education they provide to their students. As a direct result of the sky-high employee dissatisfaction, Fusion as a whole has a scarily high turnover rate, with teachers constantly quitting to find literally any other job. Fusion doesn't seem to be able to grasp the concept that by taking better care of their educators (their main service providers!), they will have more satisfied employees, which will lead to happier students, which will create happier parents, who would act as unpaid ambassadors for the company and bring in loads of new students and income. Seems pretty straightforward, no? Alas, Fusion is a company of short-term solutions, with no long-term vision of making each individual campus genuinely the best that it can possibly be. A great example of this is the nature of new hires - Fusion will hire just about anyone with a Bachelor's degree, as long as they have social skills and can grease their way through the interview. In many cases, the new hires are woefully underqualified, with little to no background in the subject/class that they claimed they could teach. This tends to happen when a teacher finally decides they can't take Fusion's nonsense anymore, and quits. Fusion loves taking advantage of very recent college graduates with no other options, or anyone who has a Bachelor's and is underqualified for just about any other job. Then, Fusion will give their new hire a ton of different classes to teach, leaving this poor fresh-faced employee swamped in tons of material that they have to teach themselves in an inhumanely short period of time. I've seen new teachers come in and immediately be assigned six new subjects to teach in their first week at the job. This lackadaisical approach to hiring means the students receive a distinctly sub-par education. Because of the high turnover, some students even have three or more different teachers over the course of two semesters. Not to mention, Fusion has people move up to on-campus administrative positions via the route of networking and seniority - not because of their merit. Many of the upper-level people trusted with coordinating student success have no actual certification or formal qualification in education, and got their positions by schmoozing their way to that position. I really pity the students who have to experience education through the farce that is the majority of Fusion's organization. Not only that, but the administration also dictate teachers' daily lives. When school administrators are not qualified to be where they are in the company, it makes the daily lives of teachers an unorganized, tense, stressful mess that leaves many employees emotional wrecks. A Fusion teacher can be a great educator with the students, but god forbid they are regarded unfavorably by administrative staff because of something like social awkwardness or a different sense of humor - a lot of teachers get fired because they don't get along with admin, so a tiny situation is taken advantage of and blown up to appear like a huge issue. Then, the admin fires the teacher, using that as their excuse. Fusion gives a student 25 class sessions per semester if they are in a high school course, and 30 per semester if they are in middle school or are in an honors-level high school course. That's 25 class sessions to fit in material that public school students have five classes a week, and about 15 weeks per semester to learn. That means Fusion students are expected to learn 3 classes worth of material in one session of 45-50 minutes. If they don't and the teacher thinks additional sessions are needed to finish the semester, parents are charged well over $100 per additional session, until the end of the semester. This is all because Fusion wants to maximize profits, by giving students close to the absolute bare minimum in order to meet seat time requirements but charging their parents just as much, if not more, than another school providing a higher quality education with much more instruction time. Fusion can then minimize the amount of compensation they give to their teachers per course, and maximize the amount of students that can be crammed into one teacher's schedule over the course of a calendar year. Great plan to maximize profits, until the parents start to figure out that Fusion sees their students as nothing but money cows. Last of all, Fusion does not advertise itself as a special needs school. The majority of Fusion employees are not certified special education teachers. Regardless, Fusion will often admit students with special needs, who need accommodations and modifications that Fusion teachers often have no idea how to provide. This makes the teaching experience unbelievably stressful for the teachers, and confusing and frustrating for the students. Nobody wins in this situation, but it happens all the time at Fusion Academy.