Of course, not everyone can teach, but in the lower grades anybody who can manage children efficiently and keep them amused can do so -- and a mother of 6 or 9 is eminently qualified! I'm not a good child manager, but I have a strong theatrical background and as a substitute I kept them off balance and entertained . . . . Private school loved me, when I was between jobs I applied to the public school to work as a sub, but they didn't want me, no edumakashun degree. Idiots.
And tuition is ALWAYS a burden, especially with paying all the inflated public school taxes too. That's why we moved to a county with lower school tax millage rates (and a very favorable sliding scale on taxes for older citizens, a category we are approaching more rapidly than we like).
If your employees showed you how they could have the work covered and have the necessary staff on call without hiring more folks (or maybe with having the ladies with children at home job-share) you might go for it. We are all professionals, too, and we get our work done. In fact, our department is leading the pack in meeting our goals (and we have absolute deadlines that cannot be fudged) although ALL of us telecommute two days a week.
“I would think that the qualified parents with the most kids (more little Catholics!) would get first crack at the teaching positions that come open.”
As I pointed out, even if EVERY teaching position were given to a parent of a student, typically, that would only take care of perhaps 6% of the families in a school. There are more families than that with more than three or four children.
However, the strength of many of the Catholic schools in this area is that a significant percentage of their faculty have been there for a long time. Thus, for a school to maintain this strength, even fewer families could be accommodated by hiring one of the parents. Perhaps 2% - 3%. The rest are out of luck.
“And tuition is ALWAYS a burden, especially with paying all the inflated public school taxes too. That's why we moved to a county with lower school tax millage rates (and a very favorable sliding scale on taxes for older citizens, a category we are approaching more rapidly than we like).”
That's nice. My county is a “low-tax” county in Maryland, comparatively speaking. I still pay $5,000 in property taxes (if I owned a house of similar value one county over, my property taxes would be $10,000 - $16,000), and the top income tax rate is over 8%. And, of course, we also now have a 6% sales tax. And our real estate recordation fees and transfer taxes are among the highest in the nation.
Until you get out to the far exurbs of Pennsylania or West Virginia, or southern Virginia, Washington, DC is a very expensive place to live.
“If your employees showed you how they could have the work covered and have the necessary staff on call without hiring more folks (or maybe with having the ladies with children at home job-share) you might go for it.”
If they could square a circle, I'd go for that, too. The difficulty for us is that we see clients every day and do work on their sites, and clients like to be seen between 9 am (8 am at the earliest) and 5 pm. Many of our clients won't have us in before 8 am or 9 am, and many won't let us stay after 5 pm or 6 pm.
Thus, it's really tough to get 10-billable-hour days out of our work.
As well, it's a lot tougher to respond to emergency calls when we have fewer staff available each day of the week.
Although no one formally "telecommutes," many tasks can be done remotely, and thus, staff members are free to work from home when they can. But it is tough to schedule an entire day at home, and it's even tougher to create schedules and routines around remotely-performed tasks.
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