School Specialty Reviews

Former Employee – worked at School Specialty

Pros – Working with educators and making a positive fun learning experience with children.

Cons – This company is having some serious financial problems, brought on partially through poor aquistions and corporate poor decision-making. Always had hiring freeze, lay-offs, no pay raises the past 4 years, no bonuses, 40lK match shut off and company wide furloughs, sometimes 3 or more per year including 1 week company shut down. Health insurance benefits always changing and going from bad to worse. Mandatory health assessments and 'grade' determines your portion of coverage. Virtually no communication, severely under-staffed with managers micro-managing; spying on your productivity, to the point where people are unable to do necessary quality work. Management and HR treating educated mature adults like children.
How about the executives taking a financial cut first, starting directly from the top before hitting the lowest compensated workers. We employees make up the foundation or the rock of the company, make the wheels turn while diving in the mud doing it.

Advice to Senior Management – Many frustrations due to having financial and management issues in working environment. Favoritism for some employees, no respect or appreciation for others, never a thank you, and tendancy to micro-manage the under-staff workers. Company should treat employees as their greatest access not a liability.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – Premier division allows you flexibility in work s Hedy.e for sales, product helps students and many kind people that want to help. New president at Premier could improve things

Cons – Furloughs, pay cuts, lack of needed materials, poor leadership at the Premier site, promotions given to people that aren't qualified, some leaders like VP of sales have never lead anything that has been successful and he is trying to lead the sales force......many regional managers overpaid for what they do and are just hoping they are not the next one eliminated so they are no more than yes people.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to the field not the leaders as they are only interested in telling you what you want to hear. The basic sales structure will not work with today's market. Until sales and office people trust you nothing will change. The current team of leaders minus the new president are not trusted by those they lead and nothing most of them can do will regain the trust.....too many broken promises. Noone trust the leader of sales ...he is I way over his head.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – Good people at Director levels and below
Flexible time off options
Casual, I mean casual, not even business casual, dress code
In the business of helping to Educate the future, when you get away from all the other junk, it really could be a good thing

Cons – Executives are disengaged and out of touch with what is really going on around and inside of the business
VPs are incompetent and unexperienced in their roles and provide little to no productive direction to their business units
Financial stability of the organization continues to decline with most recent stock prices hovering around $3.00 compared to the mid 40's of 5 years ago
Education market is tough right now, but School Specialty has done a lot of damage themselves...bad leadership making bad decisions leads to even worse financial results

Advice to Senior Management – Get in the game and make sure your chose front-line has a clue and is held accountable. The little folks can only work so hard and do so much without your help.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – Good at providing on going training and there are some advancement

Cons – Furloughs, lack of raises, no 401k match...

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – The people in my immediate area are helpful.

Cons – Lack of financial leadership. Company is grossly overextended. Just let an additional 68 full time people go, 23 in Customer Care. Lack of knowledge is terrible. Helping anyone? What a joke. The database, Oracle, is cumbersome at best. Finding someone to help with finding information on Oracle is a joke. No one wants to help you succeed, especially managers. Just told to "look on Schoolyad", the inhouse website.

Advice to Senior Management – Get back to basics. School Smart brands are horrible. Quality at Caliphone, Artco-Bell are also terrible. SO much money is given back as credits, or No Charge Returns. Terrible money management. Need better leadership at all levels!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – I love the work and my co-workers. It is a shame that such good people, who work hard to provide the best customer experience are treated so poorly. The employees have no support and no incentive to do well.

Cons – Salaries have been decreased through furloughs and significant salary reductions for the past few years. No 401K match the past three years.
The management's focus is to satisfy the investors. Too many levels of upper management.
There is no opportunities for upward mobility or incentives for going beyond the scope of the work function.
When sales goal is met one year, unobtainable goal is given following years, even though the "desireable" compensation package is 70% base salary and 30% bonus/commission. You only receive merit pay increase if you meet sales goal. Of course, raises have not been given in three years.
Very little training and support to do the job.
Outside sales is requires to have a vehicle that meets minimum requirements set by the company, but SSI only pays 71.4% of the vehicle expenses.

Advice to Senior Management – Educate yourself on the education market...the difference between commodities and curriculum selling. Apply reductions in divisions not making money, not across the board.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – Being in the education market is a plus. Good co-workers, decent managers.

Cons – Poor biz decisions--running biz into ground. Doesn't empower workers to succeed. Treats professionals like children. Forced pay cuts and furloughs.

Advice to Senior Management – Treat people as your most important asset. Don't run a publishing company like a commodities biz.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at School Specialty

Pros – Your co-workers that are on your team are the only ones that care. Your co-workers will become your friends and therapist!

The pay is good. Highest paying job I ever had. Pretty good for only have H.S. Diploma and no additional education.

Cons – First I'll say when I got to the "Employer support in balancing between work life and personal life?" question on this review I had to give it a 1 for very dissatisfied, and that's only because I couldn't give it a zero or a negative number. Management doesn't care about your personal life. To them you don't have a personal life. You have work and that's it. Nothing else matters. You must be on the phones for your entire shift. You are not allowed to take any extra breaks (to use the bathroom) other then the ones that are scheduled for you. If you do you will get called out on it and the group that does the schedules will question why you were off the phones.

So bottom line you can't be off the phones for any reason unless they schedule it. Or you will get in trouble.

They won't put any extra effort into working with their employees to make sure the employees are happy. Most of the time you will get the "it's out of my hands" reaction.

Advice to Senior Management – Nothing will ever change with management. They don't care to hear what you have to say or want to hear comments or complaints. It's very hard to find them when you need them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – The biggest pro about the company is simple, the days off (and at this company you are going to need it). 3 weeks of paid PTO that accrues during the year, which is really nice. Also, the people which you spend the days are also very nice.

Cons – The negatives, I don’t think you can really begin to express the lack of understanding of leadership, knowledge, or relationships between middle management and their employees. The management has actually said, “no negative suggestions during team meetings”. This, I do not understand. Well, I think we all do, they do not want other employees speaking together and coming up with ideas. The mid-level management does not like listening, taking advise, or giving credit for advice given by employees under them. I firmly believe that they have no management training whatsoever. Also, a negative is the fact that while working, you are given no breaks during the day that are not scheduled. You are on a VERY strict schedule. If you deviate, in the least, you are in trouble. Don’t expect to go to the bathroom in-between breaks. Two 5 min. breaks per week, if there are more, you are in trouble. It is very structured, to a fault. Management is unwilling, or unable to adapt to employee wants or needs. The breaks, for example (although we DO get 3, two 15min and one 30 min) are spaced out so you have two breaks close together and one break 5 hours apart. The company does not know how to make employees happy. They don’t care. And for a company that “prides” itself on “giving an A+ Experience” they sure don’t give it to their employees.

Advice to Senior Management – The best advice I can give, is take ONE class for management. Learn how to lead. Realize that your employees have ideas, and ideas do NOT always come from management.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at School Specialty

Pros – close to home. love my co-workers.

Cons – company is ok. Career advancement is non-existent. There is no focus on improving and growing their employees.

Advice to Senior Management – The company really needs to implement some sort of 360 review process.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend