Good flexibility and work-life balance, but low pay issues - Substitute Teacher ESS Employee Review

local manager Nicole Michalczyk is fantastic to work with. The ESS org overall is well run with great tech tools to accept or decline assingnments easily. Nicole also is great at sending reminders regarding benefits available to employees and also offers lots of 'spiffs' to engage staff. Working in the city of Nashua public school system has been fantastic and eye opening. Teachers and Admin staff overall great and I've worked in may of the schools!

The ONLY con is that school budgets to pay subs is pretty low, but understandable considering budgets across the nation for public schools are tight! There is a funding problem for schools in general across the NH and the nation - this is not an ESS issue.

Most of the teachers and other staff members with whom I am working are friendly and respectful to me, and ESS also seems to genuinely care about its employees. The application and hiring process is also very easy. I also normally take openings on a day-by-day basis, so if I don't need the money, I don't need to go to work on most days on which I really don't want to.

The salary is low, and in the state and school district I work in, it is only about minimum wage. Substitute teachers might make more, though, as might people working in other districts. As openings can be put into the system at any time before the school day, including the previous afternoon or earlier, I usually wake up early so I can check the openings that day. There aren't always openings, so work is essentially not available on some days. It is available on most days on which I check diligently in the morning, but having to get up early and check that is annoying. ESS also didn't really give us enough training for our jobs in my opinion. This made the hiring process easy, but I felt very unprepared at first. On many days, the teacher or other paraprofessionals did most of the work and did not delegate much to me, which I guess some people might consider a good thing. But I think that it might be because they thought that I was unprepared.