Facilities - Facilities Manager Rosedale Baptist Church Employee Review

positive, uplifting, great support system and benefits

As all ministries, lots or tasks and departments tend to bleed into eachother. Manageable with good communication!

A place of employment for those with unaccredited teaching degrees, but starting pay (for educators with experience teaching) is less than half of what Baltimore County's starting rate for base level teachers is. As always, I still love, love, love my former students, ran into one today at Costco, still at in regular communication with others. They're the best.

Some staff were pleasant, but they were the minority. Others were clique-ish, rude, deceitful, or would measure you up in seconds and deem students and/or volunteers and/or other staff worthy or unworthy of their time and energy. Also, staff parents fought to have their kids given special privileges, grade reconsideration, and other benefits, even if they claimed they didn't. I attempted all day to get a student care on an off-campus Rosedale Baptist sponsored activity during school hours because I knew she had a broken arm, but I was brushed aside and told the girl, K.B., was faking it. I used professionalism and referenced my experience being trained and licensed in EMS, and I also escalated the girl's plight all the way up to the highest chain of command at Rosedale, from fellow teachers w/more experience to assistant principal, head principal, chief administrator, and I was told not to worry about it. Their student's safety and care was not their concern, because I pushed and requested if the girl could please go in a private car to the ER for treatment, if we could at least call her parents (I had zero cell service all day). Instead, the senior admin pulled aside a female sports staffer who barely glimpsed at the girl and said she was "probably faking it and milking for attention," and then I was told to just take a seat on the bus and stop asking about it. The girl was always quiet but level headed, and she could not move her arm, and she was repeatedly denied treatment or medical care by Rosedale staff. The ice bags I was able to grab from her came from the camp kitchens. Upon return to the school and seeing all my homeroom to their classroom, I immediately dialed all the numbers for this girl's parents to inform them (seven hours after the incident!) that their daughter had been injured and it was in my best opinion to take her immediately to see a doctor. I left messages, asked another teacher to keep an eye on my homeroom, and rushed out to the parking lot to attempt to locate her parents, to no avail. The next morning, I'm called out of homeroom because the girl's father was in our head principal's office and very upset with his daughter's neglect the previous day. I shamefully shared everything I personally did as if it was Rosedale I was protecting, but I did not share with him that I tried every leader in authority and none of them allowed her to receive any assistance and blatantly refused to call her parents or take her to the ER. He was appeased, my boss was discombobulated having never even taken me seriously when I said the girl needed attention but also relieved I made them look good (as it was clear my job was on the line). Immediately after school, I pulled up the student's address and went to a bakery and a florist on my meager $22k annual salary and spent $60 on a lovely stuffed animal, gourmet fancy cake, and balloons as a get well. Her parents were so shocked because nobody from Rosedale had ever visited them before, and the cake was quite lovely and all, and I just poured my heart out with sincerity of how awful I felt about the injury, the lack of supervision provided by the campsite and Rosedale, but how I stayed by the girl's side almost the entire day unless I was personally hunting down another ice pack. I kept saying "we" but there was no "we" in rendering care to the student, just powerless me. That traumatic incident aside, would I support Rosedale? Still no. Staff turnover was 50%. Female staff were belittled and ignored Female staff with seniority and respect would have their office gutted behind their back, their items broken as they were shoved into boxes, and moved into virtual closets or open-concept rooms without privacy so newer male staff could have private offices. I was asked to render care to a new employee who was having a massive anxiety attack, couldn't breathe well, high pulse because the stress was so great and she realized "I never should've taken the job." I had an entire room full of sixth graders tell me how uncomfortable Ms. So-and-So made them, how she'd lean over the boys' desks, how she'd touch them when they didn't want it, how she'd be in their personal space and wouldn't respect boundaries. Even if the touches seem harmless to an outsider, these kids were super sheltered from the opposite sex, and most importantly, consent is key. These kids did not consent. They asked me not to share, that they were very uncomfortable and "didn't want to be retaliated against," but I went to bat for them anyway. I was told not to listen to them complain about that teacher anymore, their concerns were brushed under the rug, and that the blame should rest solely on the kids. Later the kids told me that their leader, a staff senior kid, was disciplined at home because he tried to report this impropriety by the female employee. That it? Still no. My classroom was oftentimes completely bare or missing desks and chairs when I'd arrive in the morning. I'm sorry, but if I'm barely being paid as it is, and promised overtime is denied, and I'm required to show up after hours for mandatory all-school events, all unpaid, I will not arrive an hour early unpaid every day to ensure my class was how I left it the previous day. Because the church shared so many classrooms with the school, and they thrived on a largely volunteer basis, things would be broken, missing, etc. Numerous times desks would collapse down on top of kids, sometimes injuring them in the process, and I'd explain this to senior administration but I'd be brushed aside as "we're doing everything we can" while putting those same broken desks back in service. It is nigh impossible to teach kids they have any sort of value when their own school doesn't protect them from injuries, bullies, broken furniture, etc. On a personal note, I did report several times that a male student was being very sexually inappropriate with me and would ask me to do things, would hover in my personal space at my desk, and at one point made to kiss me as I was bending sideways to retrieve my books. I immediately left, found male leadership, and reported the incident. I also scheduled a meeting with the senior principal and begged him to please review the security footage and that it was extremely unwanted advances and this boy didn't seem all right in the head, etc., but he point blank looked at me and told me he "wasn't going to do that." I cried. Only after I started sharing with his own boss, our top dog in leadership, over lunch in the cafeteria and he witnessed that same male student come up to me and try to get me to come aside and give him attention did finally something happen. No discipline of any sort, just a "talking to," not even a report was filed for documentation. I believe the excuse I was eventually was given was that kid probably had something wrong with him, he's got a tough story, and importantly, his dad was wealthy. Finally, on my last day ever at Rosedale, some staff were sharing at the picnic and it came up that we had a HSA. That was a year I'd had $11k of medical expenses (50% of my annual salary), and I wasn't informed of an HSA until literally three days before it expired, but I was "working for the Lord." This is end of day, no way over the weekend I could get the information on time, and my hiring principal said I should've been told in a meeting with another lady, a meeting they'd never scheduled or informed me of. That is how scattered and stressful and last second everything seemed at Rosedale, as if we were in a constant state of rushing to the next big thing, and stuff like a health savings account would slip through the cracks, like the time a kindergarten/early elementary class went without heat in the middle of winter and staff were upset that the kids were just told to wear their winter coats instead of calling the parents to pick the kids up. Because the curriculum used is a homeschool curriculum that can be then adapted for classroom use, there was far too much in my textbooks to cover in a year, made worse by the fact a math teacher without my subject experience was my department head and declared what additional items (outside of 3 textbooks) I was to required to include in my curriculum, and further exacerbated by the many, many times we'd not have classes due to campus activities, sporting events, unplanned fire drills, or fundraisers. Under supported, under valued, and disrespected. When I left Rosedale at the end of the year, Pastor Tewell came to my husband's work to "make amends" and offer his apology to my husband, not me, over my near assault by the male student. This was more of a "scouting trip" to see if my husband or his employment could be of use in any way to him or the Rosedale Baptist campus someday in the future. He promised to come back in the future to apologize for how I was treated, but it's been years, and we didn't anticipate follow through anyway.