No teacher pay during COVID classroom shutdown?

[Anonymous]

DD is a lead classroom preschool teacher and gets a whopping $17/hour and maybe 2 weeks of PTO a year. They get health insurance but have to pay around $200 per month out of that meager salary. They closed for three days before Christmas because they didn't have enough staff due to covid. She got paid for a part day because they did online teaching for a couple hours.

It's brutal and while she loves kids, even as a new college grad it's really not enough, and she's looking at grad school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We are entering our third classroom shutdown due to a positive COVID case in the past 12 months. It's always 14 days from the last day the infected person was in the room, which this particular time means only another 7 days. (I'm convinced it's highly likely this particular case developed over Christmas and NOT when they were last at school but that's neither here nor there).

Found out during the last shutdown from a teacher that even though we all pay full tuition during the shutdowns, they DON'T get paid. The best they can do is file for brief unemployment. That's terrible, right? Do others have any idea what happens during similar situations at your daycares?

This is a private chain of centers. There are a lot of them. I know I should just name it but I'm hesitant. We're mostly happy with it but this business of not paying our classroom teachers while they shut down the room just seems very, very wrong.

Did you even think to ask the administration if this was true or do you just blindly believe the teacher?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DD is a lead classroom preschool teacher and gets a whopping $17/hour and maybe 2 weeks of PTO a year. They get health insurance but have to pay around $200 per month out of that meager salary. They closed for three days before Christmas because they didn't have enough staff due to covid. She got paid for a part day because they did online teaching for a couple hours.

It's brutal and while she loves kids, even as a new college grad it's really not enough, and she's looking at grad school.

Only $200 a month for health insurance sounds great! Wow! The center must be subsidizing a lot of that.