My wife was working as a teaching assistant in one of the popular child daycare franchise in Chicago suburbs.
In the last 6 months she has worked I started seeing the plight of a daycare staff.
1) With a minimum wage of $15 per hour, she has to deal with sick kids almost everyday. Parents just drop off sick kids and leave. My wife was sick almost every month. She comes in sick and makes others at home sick also.
2) With exposure to this sick environment they don’t get a decent health plan also. They have to pay almost half of their paycheck for a high deductible health plan.
3) They said lunch will be provided everyday for the staff. But it was not a dedicated lunch for staff but the leftovers of what the kids eat there. Some days if the kids eat everything then you don’t get lunch at all. Also the food they give for kids are mostly canned and frozen. They give fresh food once or twice a week. For the amount the parents pay, the kids eat below par quality food.
4) They have a very high employee turnover which is obvious. Because of that they make you to take the required mandated online trainings after work at home. So technically they don’t pay their employees to get the government mandated training for this job. You have staff working with kids who are most of the times not trained to do the job.
5) Special needs kids don’t get a separate class and most of the staff don’t know or have been properly trained to deal with them. These kids sometimes have their bad day episodes and staff don’t know what they are doing. The parents don’t seem to worry that their kid needs special needs classes when informed by the staff and just keep dropping them off into the regular classes everyday. Because the management gets the money they don’t push back to the parents but let the untrained staff deal with it.
Its mind boggling that people who take care of kids in a hazardous environment are highly underpaid and exploited. I am pretty sure the franchise owner is taking in a lot of money and they buy donuts once a week as staff appreciation.
The shit these people have to deal is worth just a donut as appreciation?
She quit her job already. It’s not worth it.