Pros
Most of your coworkers on the teaching level are competent people with engaging lessons, who try to genuinely work with their students with both academics and their socio-emotional development. Racially and culturally diverse, depending on the school site.
Cons
The central office is terribly mismanaged, especially payroll--payroll can and will misrepresent you in your tax filing, meaning employees can be on the hook for thousands of dollars in federal taxes without warning. Attempting to call to fix this will cause the payroll employees to tell staff that the staff member in question must have made an error and there will be no attempts to fix the issue. It should be noted that hundreds of employees have made this unknown "error." Payroll also recently "overpaid" many of their employees, and found it fit to inform them on the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week that they would have potentially hundreds of dollars withheld from their bonusses to address the overpay--and then sent communications the very same day stating that these overpay emails were sent to the incorrect employees. Principals are hired without experience or qualifications and regularly shift blame for student behavior onto the teachers. Students regularly become violent with each other or with teachers and face little to no consequence. Restorative Justice is preached, but not acted upon. Parents who threaten teachers are still allowed on school grounds, in the same room as the teachers they threaten, often without any security present. School Resource Officers are not assigned to schools all day. Some will stay over their allotted time when they can, but if they get a call to leave, no one will be at the schools during certain windows of time. There are too many systems in place. There's an employee resource center where you can see your paystub, but no way to reset the password for the account without talking to administration, meaning if you are out for a holiday and forget your password you have no way to check your pay or tax withholdings. The ERC is also where employees can see how many absences they have left, but have to apply to actually use those absences in another website, which does not track how many days employees have left to use. A similar lack of consistency can be seen with how professional development is tracked, with there being two separate websites for applying to get credit and actually tracking that credit and observations. Both websites for PD have options for tracking credits and tracking observations, so I do not understand the separation here at all. As a Renewal district, RSS theoretically should be more flexibile when it comes to the amount of testing students are put through. Instead of taking advantage of this, testing has just as much focus here as it does anywhere else. The board has an absolutely archaic policy prohibiting "sex-based clubs" (Gay-Straight Alliances and similar organizations) from being formally recognized, even at the high school level. Diversity in terms of traditional genders, race, and culture is celebrated, so I don't see why we can't include sexuality and being transgender in our diversity rainbow as well.
