Ventajas
This job provides great hands-on learning on how to work with kids of a wide age range. The job also is great for those who have other jobs or are active college students as it doesn’t run for the whole day but at part time hours. This job was excellent as an introductory job into child care and allows you to really figure out what you're passionate about when it comes to children (adding in academic support, running projects and crafts, or even just working on the more administrative aspect of the job and communicating with parents). The scheduling is also pretty flexible which is good for emergencies or if you work multiple jobs. The kids are also incredible little people who just want to have fun in the program and make friends. This job doesn't really provide more than 30 hours a week so if you are a full time or even a part time student it is easy to build your academic schedule around this job which is really stress reducing.
Desventajas
Although this job provides you with the ability to work with many age groups there is no structure as to how the kids are divided up which causes tension between the older and younger kids. Instead of forming the comradery that was strived for, it caused the older kids to not enjoy their time in the program. There was also a lot of turn over while I was there which caused massive inconsistencies for the kids on who would be there and provided stress for staff as we were constantly understaffed and working over ratio. Although the schedule was flexible which was awesome, there was rarely support provided so if someone called out you may be dealing with 60+ kids with only 4 staff members which just isn’t enough to be able to really do the job and help the kids as well as run the curriculum. Upper management rarely provides the support needed for their staff members who are on the “front” so to speak interacting with the kids and parents on a daily basis. There is a severe problem with the organization of the program on all levels and can make the day to day functioning of the program really stressful and cause a lot of confidence issues in staff members on what they were expected to be doing.