Strong Teacher Development, Negative School Culture - Anonymous employee Classical Charter Schools Employee Review

Thank you for your feedback! There is a lot to chew on here. First, thank you for highlighting our dedicated staff and strong community. It is something that we’re very proud of. We are also very proud of our ability to develop new teachers and ensure that every teacher in our school has the knowledge and support necessary to produce great results. Over the past 16 months, we have made a concerted effort to bring in more experienced staff (at all levels) and we believe that will serve us well moving forward. That being said, it is definitely our preference to promote from within which we think is helpful in building a strong, close knit community. We are sorry to read that you left us with the belief that some of our decisions were not made with the student's best interest in mind. In actuality, all of the decisions we make are made through the lens of what is best for students. That is the reason our specials staff is so robust and why we hire Speech Therapists and School Psychologists as full-time staff instead of using district services. While we do have a culture of high expectations for all students that is difficult for some of our newer teachers to manage at first, some of your characterizations are overstated. Our staff turnover rates have varied but have improved significantly over the past few years, a trend that we anticipate to continue thanks to our ClassiCorps fellowship. Student attrition is no higher than a typical school in our district and we work hard to keep all of our students until they graduate from 8th grade. Finally, our Character Curriculum is a work in progress that will undergo the same revisions and modifications that our Core Curriculum undergoes. Again, thank you for your feedback. As you mentioned, we are an organization that is focused on improvement and will continue to identify and address areas of improvement as we grow.