Crazy nepotism making me want to quit!
Looking to vent but also for some advice please! I feel very anxious about posting on Reddit so please be kind.
For some context, I work at a small private school in BC. We have less than 20 members of staff for the full school, and under ten teachers.
My boss is the principal of the school, and we have no vice. We have a board of directors, but they do nothing and we are told that we are not allowed to contact them for anything. Last year they had us complete an anonymous survey about our experience working at the school, and even though people were very honest about their concerns, nothing came of it.
My boss hired his own son to be a teacher at the school. He is around 40 years old, a first year teacher and absolutely awful at his job. I’m sure I was awful as a first year teacher too, but he has it in his mind that he is a gift from god. Despite screaming at the kids, encouraging bullying, making fun of students accents and teaching absolutely no curriculum, his father (our principal) often tells the rest of us to be more like him.
I’m at my wits end. I love the kids I work with - I have both a specialties position and a homeroom so I get to work with all the kids in the school. They are lovely. All the other teachers are lovely. Despite this, I have started hating my job due to my boss and his son.
The son will spy on us for him. Even though he lets his class play video games on their computers from 8:30 - 12:00, he snitched on me the other day for teaching my class how to play a card game. I figured it would be a fun team building activity and I’m often looking for fun ways to teach SEL skills, especially since most of my class has autism, and we honestly had a blast. During our time playing, my boss’ son (who should have been supervising his own class!) came into my classroom, asked what we were doing, and went off to tell his dad. The next day, we are all pulled into a meeting about using class time effectively and are told not to play board games or card games with our students.
This is just scratching the surface of my frustrations. He gives his son extra weekly prep time, he doesn’t require his son to run any events even though the rest of us are told it’s in our contracts, he gave all of us 10 month contracts our first year but immediately put his son on continuous, he doesn’t give his son duty, he lets his son wear any type of footwear he wants even though the rest of us get warnings if we wear anything but black dress shoes, he has let his son buy hundreds of dollars worth of new tech and furniture for his classroom when I haven’t been able to buy new materials for mine for basically the past four years. It’s endless.
Because we are told to never contact the board, there is literally nobody I can talk to about this stuff minus my coworkers. They all are just as frustrated, and we know that what is happening isn’t right, but I feel helpless. I’m seriously considering moving schools but fear it’s too late in the year now.