A lot has already been said about the low pay, double standards, little appreciation, heavy load of work, low quality online classes, and favoritism at its worst. I agree with all! I would also like to add lack of proper training for clinicians, consultants, and even upper management. I should hurry to add that by training I do not mean the two-week training during which they teach every one LMB's methods and strategies. Also, I do not mean on the job training sessions with attractive titles and no useful content either. I mean the type of professional training that is absolutely necessary when dealing with children and all the issues that they might have in addition to education. Children who spend at least 4 hours a day (Mon-Fri ) at the center.
During the two years, I worked at LMB, I saw many children with behavioral problems. In fact, the majority of the children who come to LMB have special needs, but never, not even once, did they train us to deal with behavioral and special needs issues. Most of us used our common sense and the problem with that was that there was no consistency in dealing with individual children. When there was a problem, one clinician ignored the whole thing and was nice to the child anyway, the other one decided to be strict, then one consultant, herself with no training at all, decided to give the child motivators, while the other consultant decided to take the motivators away and after all this, one sunny day, when the CD suddenly appeared in blue mist and smoke, she blamed every one equally for not knowing how to deal with a certain child and disappeared into mist and smoke again without telling us what to do. Children, the ones with issues, almost always took advantage of this and did whatever they wanted, and the center really wanting to keep the child and get the parents' money never did anything serious about it because to them nothing is worse than losing a customer.
Yes, they did call the parents sometimes, but if the parents really knew what to do, things would not have gone this far in the first place. In terms of taking initiative to correct the issue at school, nothing significant was done in most cases. They had team meetings for specific kids sometimes, and they also asked for IS meetings! I participated in many of those! Team and IS meetings are potentially beneficial, but I am sorry to say that most of the time they proved ineffecticve because nothing in line with recent (and I mean recent) child development theories and practices was proposed. The IS meetings were done online, and away from the everyday reality of the kids we had to deal with.