Great school & teaching environment -- but -driven corporate leadership hurts teachers
Avantages
Loved my professional colleagues. All excellent, committed, and driven teachers! Supportive school leadership. I had a warm and personal connection with office staff and administration. As a private school, small class size and in general lovely, generous, and fun students. I really enjoyed working with these great kids.
Inconvénients
Compared to public school teachers and staff, pay and benefits are not as good. (By quite a significant margin.) Confusion from the corporate level (a.k.a. Spring Education Group) related to contracts, teacher obligation, pay scale, and responsibilities. Teachers in Washington were on a 10-month contract, which then switched to a 12-month. Except at the same time they changed the so-called contract to an "at-will" employee, which means when I ended my job there I was not paid through the summer as expected with a 12-month contract implication. And only got half of a final paycheck... In the end, Spring is a for-profit company. The individual schools may be great places to work - mine was! But you are making money for a corporation, and they won't let you forget it. If you're lucky and have a great school admin team, as I did, that might make up for it. But you'll end up on the losing side of any contract or payment situations that come from above.
