Guidepost Montessori reviews

The corporation HigherGround behind Guidepost cares nothing for their employees or the children/families that attend their schools. On the employee front, the pay and benefits leave much to be desired. Taking time off is next to impossible, otherwise you are made to feel as though you are causing a problem to the rest of staff. They treat the employees with no consideration, care, or support. The lead teachers have no say as to what takes place in their classrooms, they move children around with no concern as to how it will affect them. There is favoritism and nepotism running rampant, while qualified staff are overlooked. As far as the way families and children are concerned the admin team fails to report illnesses and incidents to parents. They have recently hired a new Head of School and the corporate office does not support her in any way. I would not recommend this as a place to work or send your child.

Where do I begin? - Low pay ($14-16/hr) that only makes sense if you have children enrolled (many employees do). - No training. Expect to be thrown in the classroom and left to figure it all out on your own. - Lack of appreciation. Depending on your management, prepare to work like a horse and still mostly get negative feedback. - Lack of respect for low-level employees. Sorry, but if you are an Assistant Guide, your opinion doesn't matter even though you spend 8 hours in the room with children and know what you are talking about. All decisions will be made on the management level. - Prepare to have special needs children in class without any extra resources to actually cater to them (or to all the other children who get significantly less attention now that Johnny is destroying the classroom and is the teachers' main concern). - Because of the reasons stated above, prepare to engage in glorified babysitting. The "teaching" aspect gets reduced to the minimum in the chaos that ensures. Poor parents have no idea that they are paying 15-20 hundred dollars just for their child to stay alive and well. - Forget about Montessori, too. There can be no Montessori when you add highly disruptive students without extra help in the classroom. - Transparent Classroom updates. Oh, did I mention you are supposed to take happy photographs of children and send updates to parents throughout the day? If only parents knew that this means you are engaged in PR activities instead of watching their kids because that's exactly what happens when you have no dedicated time for this type of stuff. - You can't get recommendation letters. The employees are explicitly prohibited from being references for their colleagues - current or former. That's something Guidepost does "for legal reasons". All the while requiring 2 letters of reference. Interesting...