I’m trying to get employment secured for an online teaching entity which requires me to get reciprocity for my teaching license in another state.
Seems simple enough, right? Ha.
The require official transcripts for my university. I paid a small fee to have them sent and immediately got an email saying they will not disperse them because of an issue with financial aid.
I know what this is. When I had a mental breakdown and had to leave the underserved school where I’d been for almost three years in order to get a part of my loan forgiven, this loan went into some kind of default because I didn’t fulfill my end of the bargain. Now, unless I pay upwards of $5K, they won’t release my transcripts.
Yes, I’m sure there are ways I might work around this but goddamn the amount of time, effort, emails, phone calls, forms, follow up I’m gonna have to do.
And my job starts in two weeks. My job that won’t be my job most likely now because of the amount of time required to cut through this red tape.
You owe the government money so on behalf of them, my university says fuck you, no transcripts unless you pay the money. It makes total sense to prevent me from getting the job that would enable me to pay the money. That makes so much sense.
And then, an email from my organization. Encouraging us to get this national virtual teaching certification with the promise that having it = greater eligibility for permanent teaching positions in the org and not having to scrape and scramble constantly to grab whatever comes available. Job security, in other words.
They offered to reimburse the cost, I thought it read. So I looked into it.
Haha. Ha. Yeah. No. There’s a coupon code from them for a price reduction of $165 from the goddamned $600–600 mother fucking dollars—this shit costs.
I wrote back just to clarify… and yes. For fuck’s sake.
If I am willing to shell out $450 of my own money… I “might” be more likely than others to obtain job security with this company.
Yep. I’m broke as fuck now thanks to my mental health issues that are incompatible with the absolute shitshow that public education turned into.
A career of almost a decade that’s in the garbage now because of how out of control it all is and how remaining and trying to go back even pushed me into breakdown/ASD burnout so bad I twice nearly had to go to inpatient.
That $45K a year wasn’t much, but I needed it. My insurance benefits that were amazing through the state to cover my whole family. Gone. My kids are now on Medicaid because my husband’s job insurance was so expensive we are barely able to afford to cover us both. My VRS retirement. Gone. My career trajectory. Fucked.
But even still, my mental health aside, I probably would have had to leave because private school for my daughters would have been $16k a year and there were no scholarships and as a part of the chaos in the school where my eldest daughter attended and I taught, there were violent fights, arson, weapons brought into classrooms, threats to harm en masse made by students, a student of mine with a history of attempted sexual violence toward female students who’d become obsessed to the point of stalking my daughter and making threats that he was going to kill me to get to her and sometimes that he was also going to kill her. The admin stopped disciplining kids. They read some whacked out extremist book that said discipline was oppression or some shit. It was a war torn demilitarized zone.
One way or another or both, I had to leave and remove my kids. I had no other choice.
And I’m still just trying to pick up the pieces, find ways to continue to practice my profession, to try to bring in enough to help my husband keep a roof over our heads, food on the table. We had to sell our house and are now renting again.
Then meanwhile… at every turn there’s more goddamn bullshit.
Fuck everything.