Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes reviews

Employees with children do not last long in Lindamood-Bell, no matter their talent. Hourly employees (all staff save 2-3 employees in each branch) are required to have open availability and work no other jobs, but branches are not obligated to fill their schedules. Hours can vary drastically, with 40+ hours a week at peak times, down to 25 or below when the center is slow. I once asked my manager for more consistent hours, to which she responded “you just called off the other day- isn’t it a little ironic to ask for more hours?” As my manager knew, I had called off to care for a sick child. Apparently children are only valued when they’re paying an hourly rate. The most disheartening turn of events I have seen, however, has been corporate’s approach to Covid-19. Despite marketing their image as a school, Lindamood-Bell has decided to open its doors to students rather than keep instruction exclusively online. Southern states with high infection rates were some of the first to open, and masks were not made mandatory until this week. We work one-on-one with students, using materials that have largely been digitized- the only legitimate argument for working in-center is technical issues that could arise on the tutor’s end. Employee oversight and accommodating parents who wish to send their kids in person are more likely the driving forces. Paired with a slew of hushed layoffs and demotions, this change has been detrimental to employee morale, a problem HR has only worsened with curt responses and gaslighting.

The handling of the recent pay cut by corporate was abysmal. Apparently an email was sent the week before the cut went into effect—and the timing here was sneaky and underhanded as it was, but I personally never even received this email and instead found out through a friend who doesn’t even work at the same location I do. There was no communication between upper management and their clinicians, and even now a week later no one in upper management has breathed a word of it, as if they’re hoping if they don’t say anything the backlash will quietly go away on its own. Clinicians and consultants, the people who work rigorously day in and out for the sake of students they love, and earn a salary that didn’t appropriately compensate the amount of work we do to begin with, deserve better than to be thrown under the bus after the countless hours we have spent laboring to make the changes in our students’ lives that the company so loves to laud to the public. There are a myriad other ways to make up for this year’s low earnings and, as if they know what they’re doing is wrong, the handling of the cuts was backhanded and deceitful. Scheduling is also a mess, constantly changing and impossible to read for clinicians who have to quickly make changes and adjust throughout the day because of a poorly designed schedule layout, instead of keeping track of and prepping for our students, which is what we really need the time for (and what our actual jobs are?!). In the past four months or so the schedule layout has changed several times and without any warning, meaning employees have to constantly make allowances for extra time spent adjusting to different and poorly designed schedules instead of actually doing our jobs.