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A teacher took to Reddit to share her experience at a school she claimed underpays staff and funnels school funds into personal accounts.
Redditor ThanosCommunistWife wrote about the frustrations in the subreddit r/antiwork in a post that has been voted on over 53,000 times.
The post has now been locked, after the Redditor received a bunch of "nasty comments," she told Newsweek in a message on Reddit.
The 27-year-old explained that she works 40 hours a week as a preschool teaching making $16 an hour. While that is "incredibly low" she said, it is on the higher end for teachers in the area and she is able to make more due to her master's degree.
U.S. News and World Report said that preschool teachers made a median salary of $30,520 in 2019—on the high end of the spectrum is a teacher who made $39,720 that year, on the low end are teachers who made $24,830.
"The owner of the private school [I] teach at are charging $1,400-1,600 a month to be in my class [and yet i'm making pennies]," she wrote. "[M]y bosses for the holiday season told the parents if they would like to give cash gifts, 'add the cash in your tuition payment and we will distribute it out.'"
She said this rule angered her to the point of confiding in a parent and explaining that payments made this way would not make their way into the teacher's pocket.
"In fact 2 teachers last year quit because there was a large cash gift given to them and my bosses refused to hand it over," she continued in the post.
She said the parents then decided to sneak money for the teachers into lunch boxes so they could intercept the cash during the school day.
Beyond the mishandling of cash gifts for teachers, the Redditor claimed she also discovered that one of her bosses seemed to be transferring cash from the school to her own account.
"[I] happened to accidentally pick up a paper showing my boss transferred $12,000 from an account under the schools [sic] name to her personal account, she also happened to be building a brand new in-ground pool at her house," she wrote. "She gets a brand new pool and i'm debating if [I] can afford a small fries and a tea from [McDonald's] for lunch. Incredible."
She explained in an edit to the post that she found the paper showing the translation after the boss used a staff copy machine to print it and left it in the "output slot"
The Redditor said she is planning on quitting but not until after the "90 day training period" because if she were to leave before then her employer can hold her final check.
She told Newsweek the turnover at the school is "very high," stating that she is the fourth teacher her classroom has had this year.
"[T]he kids kept asking me every day when [I] was going home was [I] coming back the next day. [T]his happened everyday to the point i asked my boss about it and she explained why the kids think i'm not [staying]."
She said because of this, the children struggled to open up to her and it took "weeks" for them to smile, joke, or laugh with her.
The Redditor told Newsweek that many of the nasty messages she received on Reddit after sharing the post came from people saying the mismanagement of the school had to do with the school's religious affiliations.
"[N]o where did [I] mention religion," she wrote in a message on Reddit. "[I] started getting really nasty messages about it. [P]eople assuming that [I'm] just a zealot 'who can't take criticism about my religion' when [I] never mentioned my religion or anyones to begin with."
"[A]lso, the school is non-denominational so the anti-theist comments are unnecessary," she wrote at the end of the post.
In a response to one of the comments to the post the Redditor wrote that she is conflicted about the decision to leave because of her love for the children.
"[I]love teaching, [I] live and breathe for my students and treat them like they're my own kids," she wrote. "I just spent $100 on Christmas gifts for all 12 kids and it wasn't anything for me to scrape the money together because [I] love them so much. However if [I] wasn't living with my mom [I] wouldn't possibly be able to survive on that salary."
