Employer Comparison.... Then

I didn't expect to love this work when I applied at Champions (a division of KinderCare) in 2004.

We needed a little extra cash.
I figured it would fit into my schedule, I could still homeschool my kids and get them to various activities and bonus... I knew how to babysit* already. 

They were only able to offer me 10 hours a week at first, which was great.
That was October. By mid-December, I was working 30 hours a week.
Lots of turnover in day care.
Haha, trust me. Not everyone is cut out for it.

*After I started the job, I realized how wrong I was about the whole babysitting thing. 
There are people doing the work who haven't figured that out (and run crappy programs because of it), and some who took the job thinking it would be easy, but they get sifted out like (most of) the weevils in a sack of flour. 

Show of hands... who hasn't found bugs in their food on occasion? 
There are bugs in the day care business, too.

It was a wonderful fit for me and I enjoyed it. 

It didn't (and still doesn't, 22 years later) feel like work most of the time.

I worked in four or five different programs at first. 

Monday Here and Tuesday There and on my way to Somewhere Else on Wednesday only to get a call en route and a request to be at Another Place Entirely.

Being sent to several different sites is part of the beginner game in this line of work. 
They send you where they need coverage to keep the adult/child ratio legal. It's not easy, you don't know the kids, you don't know where things are kept, you don't know the specific rules of the program. Mostly you're just a warm body to keep the program legal. 

Ha, strictly speaking, Champions wasn't as concerned about legal ratio as they should have been. 

Still aren't, I keep in touch with a few former co-workers. I have no way of knowing how often they run out of ratio now, but I can tell you for sure they do it, they don't report it, and although those rules exist for a reason they DO. NOT. CARE.

Champions is still concerned with only one thing. 
Revenue.

I could tell them at least four ways for their company to make a lot more money without having to invest a damn dime, not that I would bother. 

I'd rather see the company fall apart. 
Unfortunately it won't, but they do restructure every six years or so to get out from under a bunch of discrimination lawsuits. It's possible they don't like people who look physically handicapped. 

One case I know personally, the site director used a wheelchair and was written up for 'not hanging children's art high enough' on the walls. Did that dumb cow Sherri offer to help? Hell no. What a bitch.

Assholes.

Anyway.
When I first started this job, some programs were calmer than others. The program I was routinely sent to on Wednesdays was a screaming madhouse. If that had ended up being my daily placement after a few months, I would have quit. 

I sure wouldn't be where I am now. The site director was a nice enough person, but she was terrible at keeping kids occupied. It was loud and chaotic from the time school was out until I left when the numbers dropped to 15 kids.

But Sunshine, who directed the only site that didn't make me feel crazy, asked our manager if I could be placed at her program permanently when her assistant quit. 

That was the beginning of a five year partnership. 
I learned from the best, seriously. I did not agree with everything she did, she was more school oriented in some ways, but she respected the kids and treated them with kindness and an appreciation for their individual needs. 

The site had been open for a little over a month when I began working there, the school was brand new that fall. I helped her build the program from a sixteen-kid group to 39 daily. By the time I'd been there two years, there was already a full program and a fall waiting list when school was out in June.

I didn't want to be a site director, said no at least eight times I can remember over the years, but I finally caved and accepted a site director position in August, 2009.

I stayed there until August 2016 and seriously, I think I'd still be there if it hadn't been for the absolute shitbag of a manager we got stuck with. ( The above mentioned Sherri/shitty manager is Sherri Burks and not only is she a terrible manager, if you believe rumors (my own beliefs are dependent on who's telling me the story and I am still in touch with more than one person who knows and I DO believe every shitty thing I've heard about her) she was eventually fired. Of course it was only 10 years too late for a whole bunch of people. 

Champions is a company with nothing but money-grubbing butt sniffers (my son coined that phrase when he was seven years old, I don't remember the context but it's funny, dammit) in charge.  

It's a toxic work environment when one has to deal with the idiots from corporate, but I mostly got to do what I wanted in running my site and the school itself felt like a second home, so I put up with more crappy treatment than I probably should have. 

I don't regret working there so long or so hard because I worked for the kids, but the company was (and still is) so disrespectful to the people who do the actual work that I'm not unhappy to have gotten away from them, either.

One of the ways they were disrespectful to us besides absolute shit wages was coverage of adult to child ratios. 
When I began working there, if more than 15 kids were expected after school, two adults were scheduled to be on site. 

If the second adult showed up and there were 15 kids or fewer, that second adult was given the option to stay for two hours even though the number of children was below legal ratios or they could leave.

Meaning the person on site was there alone and could not use the bathroom or take any kind of a break during the four or five hour shift.

About a year later, the company started sending the second person home even if they'd have preferred to stay if they weren't needed for ratio. So you could make child care arrangements for your own kid, get dressed, drive to a school within 10 miles or so, go into the building and be told to leave.

Spending money to show up and not being paid for doing so. 
Just one more shitty little thing they did to people.

You KNOW the salaried managers and regional managers and corporate posterior-smoochers were being paid for mileage and oh, they also had a paid-for-by-the-company car to drive around and nitpick everyone's work. 
It probably goes without saying that none of them could have done my job.

They were well-paid to use dismissive phrases like, "All they're doing is playing."

Vicki was an idiot and a jerk. Learned about kids from a book. No empathy for them and very little emotional intelligence/compassion/understanding. Bah.

Okay, so I learned how to work with kids. 
I thought I knew how. 
I didn't.
 
Worked for Champions for 12 years, would be there still if it hadn't been for the worst manager I've ever seen. Still, 12 years of paid training is 12 years of paid training.

Sherri apparently was pissed off that I quit and didn't let her know at the end of the school year. 

I didn't know at the end of the school year that I was leaving, actually.
Even though they treated me like crap once that ignorant cow took over, I figured I'd stay and outlast her.

But then I found a job that seemed like a better fit and wrote her a great resignation letter.
Not that she learned anything from it.

I'd still like to kick her in the taco.

Sadly, the ability to kick that high is probably lost to me forever. Doesn't matter, I won't get an opportunity to kick her any time soon.

I didn't get the new job until mid August that year, but I knew in plenty of time to give her at least three week's notice. I didn't bother doing that, instead I gave only 10 days.  I did that for my families, not for the company, I sent letters to them all. I figured word would get back to her that I was leaving, so I did the courtesy of letting her know via email.

In hindsight, I should have just not shown up on the first day of school. Since she blacklisted me after that anyway. 
"Not eligible for rehire".

I heard from more than one of my families that the program 'went to hell' after I left.
Not surprised.

About a year ago a reporter from a national news organization saw a post from me on social media regarding my experiences working for the KinderCare conglomerate. 

I strongly recommended to a person that working for someone besides KC was a good idea. I stated that there were many wonderful people doing the actual work, but that KC is a toxic corporation in my opinion and most people would be treated with more respect elsewhere.

I gave the reporter some information, taking care to keep it factual, and connected her with other people I'd worked with. Some of them still work there, some are no longer with the organization.

I've never seen an article about everything, but to be fair, I haven't looked, either.

Huh. Guess I should go surf the internet.

Okay, I'm back.

I didn't find anything with the reporter's byline, but I sure found a lot of stuff about toxic KinderCare centers.

Thing is, a lot of the people who work there actually care about kids. 
But management doesn't give a shit.

One more tidbit about them.

One summer, Brashley did a stupid and insisted on roller skating with the kids. She said she fell in the bathroom, ( still don't believe it)  so she had to go to a doctor. 

He put her on half a percocet twice a day, so she was bleating about taking mind-altering drugs and how she couldn't possibly work with kids. She ended up working at KinderCare corporate (another fucking waste of money, that place).

She was there doing filing when Jeanne and her cohorts, Asbury-who-we-all-called-Assberry and Vicky learned after writing a letter to the state that they didn't have to pay us for all of our training hours. 
And not required to pay for the courses we took (you can find them online and have them count toward your yearly training hours requirements) at all.

Something else that had made us feel a tiny bit more respected was being taken away.

Jeanne and Assberry high-fived each other when they got their response email from the state.

They were thrilled that they wouldn't have to pay us for our yearly required trainings.

Assholes.

I called Rob Martin on that one, though. 
Told him that if I wasn't worth an extra couple hundred bucks a year with all that I contributed, that maybe I shouldn't be working there.

After that, our trainings were still paid for, but we weren't paid for the hours we spent taking them unless it was a corporate sponsored session.

I'll say it again.

Assholes.