TL;DR Workplace was so toxic and hostile I didn’t want to show up anymore.
For some background, I had been working at a nonprofit daycare as an instructional aide. Wanting to go into education this seemed like an amazing opportunity for experience and learning new skills.
Having come from soul sucking minimum wage jobs and desperately job hopping, I wanted something stable to pay my way through college.
I saw an ad for it and remembered a friend I knew worked there. They couldn’t stop raving about the great pay and benefits even a retirement plan for the teachers. All things that should be automatically guaranteed, but I saw as a luxurious incentive.
None of my other jobs had ever offered benefits, and the pay was pretty convincing for my situation. ($15/hr) With a 40+ hr week I was making a satisfying amount of money. Living with my fiancé, and sharing expenses I could finally afford everything I needed to live without panicking about what I would eat for the rest of the week, paying for super expensive gas and having no money saved up.
The job started out great, I learned a lot about childcare and definitely gained experience.
The parents pay a lot of money for their childcare services, more than my monthly income.
So often times, these people were well off and relied on us to pretty much raise their kids, anyway that’s a rant for a different time.
What made me straight up abandon the job was the administration. The work culture was very hierarchical. Aides were hired and cycled through often with no experience and were thrown into classes with children with special needs, behavioral problems, hyperactivity and everything in between.
Teachers either had years of experience or a bachelors degree. Didn’t matter what kind but having a degree meant they got paid up to $10/ hr more than us uneducated folks. There were rumors that even an associates would get you more pay, but that was never confirmed. Higher education was definitely favored and glorified and it’s bullshit, but I digress.
As an aide, we were meant to be the teachers right hand man. We helped with everything, from changing diapers, instructing the class while the teacher prepares later activities, classroom management, etc.
What made it so insufferable and miserable was when you take some rowdy kids and combine that with an incompetent teacher, the job is left to the aides.
The ratio was 1 staff member to 5 kids.
And with a room of 12 preschoolers that like to climb on furniture, throw toys across the room, hit, kick and bite each other, you can imagine how insane and out of control that was.
Very often, we as aides were taking charge of the classroom and were often mistaken for the teacher by the children’s physical therapists and outside visitors. At one point the teacher commented that I was “coming for her job” implying I was much better in her position than she was.
I was constantly being told I was good with the kids and other aides and teachers joked about me being the new teacher in a class that had been closed due to a teacher stepping down to an aide and later quitting. It was a joke because everyone knew that that was the worst behaved class in the toddler department and that it only paid a dollar more to move up to the teacher position without a CDA or bachelor’s degree.
There was a lot of micromanaging from the directors. One week we received about two or three emails each day all detailing the many ways one can get a write up or what is considered grounds for termination. Constant reminders of all their stupid rules, like absolutely no food or drinks in the classroom, kids should not be able to see us eat or drink, no personal items in the rooms, moving yourself around the building on an iPad with an app to track where everyone is in the building.
There was also the constant threat of a write up, their favorite word “disciplinary action” and so, so many things were grounds for termination.
Then their PTO policy was just bullshit. Any and all absences needed to be called in 2 hours before the shift, no matter what. Even something as unprecedented as an emergency. If not, you get a write up and guilt tripped about not having someone to cover your shift. If two people had already asked for a particular day off, that day was closed for PTO. Meaning no one else was allowed to call in, and if you did you needed a doctors note or again, a write up or “disciplinary action.”
PTO was applied to all absences, you could not ask for an unpaid day off. Days off had to be requested about a month in advance, otherwise they would be denied. All of my requests were denied. Even when I hit COVID, the Timekeeping manager tried to establish when my 5 day quarantine would start and end, and I interrupted her on the phone adding, “No ma’am the DOCTOR said my 5 days start today.”
I had an unexcused absence the day before I called in with the confirmed positive diagnosis, and she wanted to count that as day one of my quarantine. I used up almost all of my accrued PTO on those days and it took a month to earn it back.
Any time over 10 minutes late needed to be called in before, or again, you guessed it you would get written up.
I soon found out the directors and administrators attitudes and their viewpoints about their employees. As with any other job, as an employee we should all be aware that we are replaceable. We are simply a cog in the machine.
During teacher meetings, it was common practice for only one aide to be invited to give their peasant opinion. The teachers would go on and on and complain about their aides, their lack of hard work or whatever else they deemed necessary to point out.
The administrators constantly made it clear that aides are just are there to help, and any and all work assigned to them has to be completed.
But that would be taken out of context with teachers taking advantage of their aides and leaving all their dirty work to the aides. Of course if any aide complained about the lack of support, they would be overlooked.
The only solutions ever offered were to move classes or to change your schedule, to hopefully be placed in a classroom with a better work dynamic.
The staff director had the very strong belief that every employee was replaceable, going as far as saying that if for example the janitor were to be inappropriate to any employee, he could “just get a new one off the street any day” He also once told an aide being offered the teacher position that he needed teachers more than aides, and he could afford to lose an aide, but not a teacher. He didn’t “care as much about the aides”
So, after weeks of considering leaving and weighing my options, and after a weekend of going out for drinks with a couple of work friends, complaining and joking about how awful the work environment was, I decided to just not show up that Monday.
I slept in, didn’t call, or notify anyone.
The place is already short staffed with even the office staff, art teacher and the director filling in for the janitorial staff, baby room aides and laundry staff. Their turnover rate is ridiculous, with about three people being hired every month, and losing at least two people every other month.
I had enough, and although I will miss some of those kids, and the friends I made at work, I am so glad I decided to leave.
I’d rather be broke than miserable.