Should I stay or should I go now?

[Griff]

I gave my two weeks notice at work last week. I'm going to be finishing my Masters in Special Education this summer and originally wanted to do work and school. Unfortunately, my boss questioned my need to take a day off the week before to get my on campus affairs in order. Five weeks before this, I sent her an e-mail giving her my class schedule and suggesting we talk about reducing my hours so I could work and handle the 1 hr 40 minute each way commute. We spoke about the second class and decided that I'd be better off taking a leave of absence since the timing wouldn't work. She didn't get back to me on the first class and considering her attitude on the day off, I could see I was about to get shafted. As I spent another Saturday putting data in for staff, I worked myself into a real pissy mood. I was up against the two week notice deadline so I dropped my letter in the slot. I was careful not to burn any bridges, because I love working with this population of kids. As these things always go here, I was accused of taking advantage of the school by doing my student teaching here last semester. When I didn't reply to that, I was asked if I'd consider coming back. I replied honestly that I wouldn't rule it out. Everyone has been super nice to me in the interim.

The Good- The good parts of working where I do are very good. We use Applied Behavioral Analysis the only scientifically valid approach for children with Autism, (btw Time Magazine in full of crap, but you already knew that) While we still use discete trial training, our bag of tricks is expanding with the support of administration. The kids are awesome and we make their parents lives easier. I work with an extremely dedicated group of folks. We rely heavily on data in our decision making processes, when we do something we have reasons we're not just throwing stuff against a wall to see what sticks. I have moments of pure joy watching my kids progress. Good benefits package and our 1/2 lunch is about the funniest thing you'll ever listen to. I'm good at this job.

The Bad- Being run by the psych dept, folks with education degrees are generally looked down on. I understand the attitude because I've seen the products of many ed depts and look down on them myself. Importantly, the ed folks who stick with this program are not lazy tax farmers and know ed and psych so maybe a little respect should be forth-coming. No-one gets a positive stroke from administration. The only positive reinforcement you get at this job is from your co-workers and from the graphs of performance and behavior data. Administration assumes everyone is biding their time to jump ship, creating an attitude which makes folks bide their time to jump ship. You cannot get your job done in the time allotted. You will work a lot of unpaid over-time at a job which pays about 50% of public school wages. Right now we don't have desks and computers for everyone so you wait for your turn to do the data entry work. Appearance is valued over function- we (or maybe they) will be getting brand new computers! Unfortunately, what we needed was a scan system to put data in automatically. A ton of money is spent on shiney objects for folks to look at and every year we get the "different piles of money speech" to explain why there will be new shiney stuff, no raises, and a little bonus check to prove sincerity. This is a stressful job.