Pros
The companies inclusion services are super valuable and helpful for teachers with classroom management. Curriculum is great, hands on and easy for teachers to prep & carry out through the day. Company mission is great.
Cons
At the center level, there is not a lot of support (in my experience, although others have had great leadership and had different experiences — more people have experienced what I’ve experienced though). They give us unrealistic expectations, and are focusing on the wrong things. They should be giving raises to teachers, not to the pockets of high up who are completely disconnected from actual center life and its reality. Teachers are expected to manage classrooms where challenging behavior is common these days, run a full curriculum and maintain accreditation standards and are the backbone to this business and they do it for pennie’s! Until they close that gap, staffing will aleast be an issue, which creates hard challenges for CD’s to meet our FTE plan and Kindercare’s metric system (scorecard). They harp on labor but do not give realistic labor hours, which also impacts the scorecard for CD’s, yet we are expected to maintain ratios and juggle the 6 call outs which happen no matter how good CD’s treat their educators. The business always comes first, and there is absolutely no work/life balance — you easily work 50-60 hour weeks, to also include weekends. Over half of center directors in my area are in-ratio, in a classroom, 50%+ of the time and are still expected to complete tasks. If you were in ratio from open to close due to staffing (very common), you are still expected to commit two hours after closing to keep up with CD tasks and administration duties. I could go on… This isn’t coming from a place of looking at things through a negative lens, this is just reality of working for this company.