The company is for profit and driven by sales. It is being run by management that is very far removed from the day to day on the ground interactions that keep it up and running and often make decisions that make no sense but that we are required to follow without showing our dissent.
For example, we became a private school about a week before we started accepting students to be a part of it and the “expectation” was that we would take tens of thousands of dollars from these families and literally just “make it up as we went along” ... without credentialed teachers on staff mind you.
A year and a half later they realized how badly they screwed up and there were pay cuts and Center closures to keep the business afloat. Our pay was restored but we have yet to have any actual training in how to run a k-12 school where families are paying between $25-$35k per academic school year and it’s still a huge mess.
Not to mention that we have kids with some severe diagnosis and with needs that would be better met with a more comprehensive team of professionals or with a different goal altogether. I mean, if your kid has a permanent and debilitating disability (physically and intellectually) and cannot even follow simple language, is paying for private school lessons really the best use of resources??? We don’t partner with an ABA company but I’ve thought time and again that we really should because some of these kids won’t become functional citizens because they aren’t being treated for their social and developmental weaknesses and that’s just as critical to success as an education.
Our compensation scale is also laughable. Going from one position to another can be an enormous jump in responsibility and stress for little to NO increase, yup...lots of things are considered “add on” poisons with no additional pay. Or there may only be a dollar difference between your old carefree existence and your new stress fueled one...take on with caution!