No work home life balance, stressful, rigid, cult like mentality towards job performance at the CPCS Middle School
Pros
A well-read, well educated administration that cares about students
Cons
As a newbie to the charter school world, I was blindsided by the amount of duties I was expected to perform. I knew to expect a longer work day and believe you cannot do all you need to for students in a 9-3 environment. There is no room for freedom of expression among the students or the staff. The expectations set for 5th graders also apply to the 8th graders and they resent having to walk on lines everywhere, clapping to acknowledge a teacher and working silently in two hour long classes. Turnover is rampant and the students are jaded as a result. If you are hired as a teacher be ready to do breakfast duty, lunch duty, recess duty, back to back two hour classes sandwiched between the breakfast and lunch duty, lesson plan weeks in advance for your subject area and for an advisory class, stay after work hours to dismiss children, and sit in grade team meetings that extend past work hours. The little time you get for prep will be spent creating a teaching script with your special education teaching partner, calling parents to complete mandatory logs or going to department meetings. Go to the bathroom before you leave home or when you get home. Bring your lunch and make it something you can stuff in your mouth quickly. Be prepared to get teaching advice from every teacher, every day every minute of your prep time because they really want you to drink the kool-aid and stop questioning if there is a more fair way to get all this work done. If you get ill you will likely come to work anyway because to be out you would have to arrange for your own coverage among your coworkers who all have the same heavy workload that you do. You will be contacted about work in the evenings and on the weekends by your colleagues, especially if they do not have the same work/life demands that you do. No one will give you any inkling of what your day will be like before you accept the job, allowing you to make a well thought out decision. Teachers unions aren't perfect but I have a new appreciation for their years of fighting. UFT aside, as a stakeholder in a business model school, I would have more respect for my employees than to run them ragged for a year and watch them leave. Lastly, this school did not offer a competitve salary.
