布鲁克斯学校圣彼得堡

Interested in the school

I recently took my kids out of this school. After searching the internet, I believe this review I found from an ex-staff member touches on all of my major concerns and reasons for disenrolling them: At first glance, the package Brookes presents in their employment offer is rather enticing. After all, a decent salary while teaching in a pretty amazing city with your own apartment thrown in sounds pretty great, right? It may even stir up a certain feeling of excitement as you wait patiently in anticipation leading up to your commencement at this duplicitous new position. Well let me tell you, that’s the last time that you’ll feel the loving embrace of the elation of excitement for a long time. A very long time. Brookes Saint Petersburg is a chaotic, disarrayed shamble of an organization. Their inexperienced, pretentious administration implement a totalitarian approach towards managing the school. I feel these narcissistic egomaniacs abuse their tyrannical powers to keep their staff in a constant state of fear for their positions within the school. What they don’t seem to realize is that it’s these very staff members who are the only ones keeping the school operating. The parents and students are very aware of this and it’s only a matter of time before this hellhole collapses upon itself... I think the best way for you to understand how this school operates is to give specific examples. You’ll notice that all examples are direct results of the drastic and down-right moronic decisions made by their inept administration. In particular, it’s director, Charley King; the campus principals, Laura Rennard and Mark Broom; and it’s HR team. But first, a little bit of background information on some of these people and the depraved relationships they have formed to further their deplorable careers. At the whole operation’s core is Brookes Russia director, Charley King. He rules the school with an iron fist. His constant disregard for the students and staff through his frequent callous actions can only be defined as nefarious. He started as an administration employee at a different international school in Russia. Once he discovered how they operated, it appears he decided to open his own and use the information he had learnt to discredit his previous employer and poach their staff. He gave all these staff promises of senior management positions even though in my opinion every single one of them were drastically inexperienced. This set the scene for King to open his school, surrounded and supported by these sycophants who reinforce his every senseless decision. The worst of these being the head of HR who, surprise, surprise, is the romantic partner of King. So, the person who is in charge of Human Resources for an entire two school campuses, who employ a large range of international staff who uproot their lives and go through the countless bureaucratic nightmares involved with moving to Russia, is as I see it, dangerously under-qualified and of an unjust alignment to the company which influences her harsh decisions affecting all staff and students. The next in line among this ensemble of dishonorable characters is Brookes Saint Petersburg school principal, Laura Rennard. Words can’t even begin to describe this one. In my opinion, Laura is a downright hateful human being who should not be working with children nor be given a position of managing teaching staff. The constant disrespect and contempt I feel she shows towards the Brookes students and staff is completely unacceptable and unwarranted. All groups within the school community; teachers, students and even parents alike, were often heard and quoted as questioning how she received the position in the first place. The only conclusion I have come to is that the school was desperate to open and they accepted the first applicant available, completely ignoring her vast inexperience and fierce temperament. This was immediately apparent when Rennard was tasked to write her own welcome biography for the school’s social media pages. Her self-written entry was riddled with spelling and grammar errors, to which many parents questioned how this person could be in a charge of a whole school facility when she doesn’t even have a grasp of basic linguistics skills. Unfortunately, like is the case with most parent concerns that are submitted to Brookes, the comments were deleted and the post altered to hide the first of many, many mistakes and problems this principal would cause throughout the first year of Brookes St Petersburg’s operations. Now that you have a bit of background knowledge about a few of the administration team who run this wreckage, it’s time for a list of examples of just how negligent and vacuous their management style actually is: • As mentioned before, I feel King is a ruthless, remorseless dictator who is at the center of most of the major problems that occur at both the Brookes Moscow and St Petersburg campuses. He makes promises to the parents, students and staff which he appears to have absolutely no intention of fulfilling. A perfect example of this is the on-going issues he has had with the parents of the school’s students over the laptops and uniforms. Parents pay a huge amount of money for their children to go to this school and in return, they expect certain amenities, especially when these amenities have been promised to them upon the enrollment of their children. Parents were promised new Apple Macbooks for their children as part of the exorbitant school fees, but were given old laptops that had been in the school for many, many years. These laptops barely worked, yet students were expected to use them without complaint. This caused a major issue when COVID hit and students were forced into virtual learning. The I.T. issues that arose were beyond a joke. Parent complaints were ignored by King and Rennard and as a result, the lockdowns were made even more stressful for the students and staff due to these on-going technology issues. Also, if we were approached by parents with any questions about the school’s technology issues (as well as anything else to do with what their school fees were actually paying for) staff were actually told by King and Rennard to fabricate the truth. They actively endorse lying to the parents of the students in our class. Enough said. • King refuses to spend any of the school’s money to help the students. He tries to bleed every dollar he can from the parents. When the school uniforms were introduced earlier in the year, King and Rennard advised all parents, students and staff that the parents did not have to pay for these as they were included in the school fees. Later, during lockdown, King had his sycophants send all parents invoices for the uniforms, at a time where they couldn’t complain in person. Parents were justifiably furious at this added expense but as usual, the administration hid and felt safe behind their computer screens. This is a major issue within Brookes. King, Rennard and Broom all like to delegate from behind their monitors, rarely taking a step to see what is happening within a classroom. They are always out of touch with the students and what is happening within the school. In fact, there was a time when Rennard entered one of the classrooms around halfway throughout the school year and a student asked who Rennard was, as they had never seen the principal outside the confinements of her office sanctuary before. • Both Laura Rennard and Mark Broom, the principals of the campuses, are in my opinion petty children with a delusional jealousy towards their staff, especially those who have a natural connection with their students. I think Rennard actively works towards turning staff members against each other by feeding them lies and by discrediting many members of staff in front of their colleagues when that particular staff member is not around. She is extremely unprofessional in this regard as this happened on almost a daily basis. She avoids the classrooms of those staff members who aren’t blindly adherent to her every delegated nonsensical command, which is the majority of the staff. Instead, she hides inside her office, much like Broom does at the other campus. The students have even made social media meme pages about the two of them and their inability to effectively run the school and be members of the learning community. You know it’s bad when even the students notice that their principals just don’t care about them. Instead, these two principals spend their time within the school infecting both the learners and educators’ mental health. Some prime examples include when Rennard wanted to tell a teenager with bad body odor that “he fucking stinks, I’ll just tell him to his face” and when Broom picked on one teacher so bad that the teacher ended up in hospital. These are not isolated occurrences. One older female teacher was forced by Rennard to move some heavy shelves and as a result, something fell on that teacher and she was unable to work due to the injury. Because she was still within the three-month probation period, King and Rennard decided to just get rid of her instead of helping her recover. That’s their way. The moment something becomes a slightest inconvenience for them, they will do everything within their power to remove it from the school with no foresight of how it will affect the students and their learning. • This was also the case when COVID-19 started breaking out across the globe. Instead of supporting their students and staff, they just made life much more difficult for them. Due to the sheer incompetence of the Human Resources team at both campuses, in particular Brookes Russia HR head and Saint Petersburg campus HR head, international staff were given absolutely no updates about the worsening situation. All we had was media speculation and badly translated Russian documents which we had to find ourselves. HR gave us absolutely no support and very little information. One staff member was so worried about the situation that in his panic, he expressed that he wanted to return to his home country to look after his elderly parents. The next morning, his apartment was illegally entered and raided by Rennard and HR, a completely unacceptable move no matter what nation you live in. As a result, the staff member felt forced to leave the country in the middle of the day to go look after his parents as we were given no reassurances about what was happening. He offered to still teach his students online, which we all had to start doing only a few days later, but instead of keeping any structure and normality for the students, King’s ego got in the way and he decided to fire the staff member to send a message to the rest of the staff - you are all here to serve me and my interests and if you dare try and look after yourself, your family members or your mental health, you will be out on the street in the middle of a pandemic. He made this even more clear when the school year came to an end. Any staff members who were at the end of their contracts and not returning were kicked out of their apartments and told to leave the country within three days of the school year ending, claiming this was Russian law. Russia cancelled this rule at the start of the COVID outbreak and still are not enforcing this rule almost 9 months later. But again, King’s ego is so out of control, he would rather put these staff members out on the street, unable to fly to their home countries because Russia’s borders were shut, and without a home. He even went as far as to not pay these leaving staff members their promised bonuses and made the effort to cancel their medical insurance, even though the end date on their policies was only a month later. King should be removed from his position for this alone. It’s miraculous that no one contracted the virus during this time as he would have definitely had a lawsuit on his hands if this had occurred. He also actively made staff feel guilty about worrying about the virus by sending us regular messages advising us that we should be thankful that we even have a job. • The school is so desperate to line their pockets that they’ll give tours to new families, lying to their faces about the facilities and inclusion within the campus, and they’ll accept everyone naive enough to enroll their children there. This results in many students entering the school with little to no English skills, so teachers then lose their planning lessons as they are forced to do one-on-one Key Centre learning lessons to help these students with their language acquisition. This is neither the fault of the parent nor the student, but unfortunately the administration will just take more time from the teachers who then aren’t given any time to plan for their own classes. As a result, all students suffer as teachers only have so many hours within a day and they are all taken up with face-to-face teaching time and absolutely no planning time. It’s a chain reaction that none of the administration care about. Rennard could easily get off her ass and help out, but instead, she remained elusive, holed up and hiding inside her office, not showing a shred of care or empathy towards the already stretched and stressed staff. It’s a big reason why a well-liked member of staff with over 20 years’ experience inside the campus decided to leave after only months of Rennard’s reign. I think by now, you’re starting to get a picture of the horrendous behaviors that are demonstrated by the administration team at Brookes Russia. This unprofessional behavior is completely unacceptable and should not be tolerated by any of the staff, students and parents. I could easily write a novel with all the examples we all encountered there, but I’ll keep some of the following key points straight to the point just to help further illustrate the appalling conditions are demonstrated daily within the walls of this school: • The school is currently being sued and taken to court by parents who removed their children from the school due to Rennard and King’s incompetence. • Supplies for teachers and students are non-existent. Not once throughout the first year were any supplies purchased, which students were in desperate need for. The printers were always out of ink, Rennard would hide the school laminator so no teacher could use it (except her partner who conveniently was able to use it whenever he pleased), internet always dropped out and was never fixed, computers always froze mid-lesson, the list goes on. • The cafeteria food was basic at best, with many meals being a stale mix of leftovers from the previous days. A student even found shards of glass in his food one day. This was brought to the administration’s attention but they advised that we weren’t to tell the parents and that we had to keep quiet about it while they swept the problem under the carpet. • Most classes don’t have a teaching assistant. It was originally promised to parents that every class would have a full-time teaching assistant. But this was initially altered to part-time on each class, then almost zero time as rather than hire new staff, Rennard and King made these assistants become unqualified Key Centre teachers, taking them away from the roles they were originally hired for. • Staff were told by Rennard that they would be fired if they collaborated and shared any of their resources with their Moscow campus counterparts. • There was absolutely no Professional Development for staff throughout the entire first year. This was promised during the initial interviews. PD is extremely important for teachers as it helps them to develop and improve their teaching practices. But Brookes unfortunately does not seem to believe in helping their staff to become better. • The school has no curriculum in place, no documentation to help teachers, no behavior policy, and no focus or policy on child protection. • When teachers were hired, they were told that they would have to do one duty per week. This quickly became 5-6 and most teachers didn’t even have time to sit down and have their lunch. • Rennard’s e-mails to staff became a running joke. Whether it be not sending it to everyone they should have been sent to (in her paranoia, she once accidentally admitted that she didn’t want school director King to know how she was running the school) or the countless spelling and grammar mistakes, we just ended up having to shake our heads in disbelief. You know it’s bad when every parent in your class asks you during parent/teacher interviews if the school principal is illiterate due to the amount of e-mails they had received from her with errors, even including the parent’s names spelt mistakenly. • Even though the campus looks like an abandoned mental care facility building, King will not allow anything to be stuck on the walls. A school with nothing allowed on the walls. This is essential with PYP and MYP learning, but King doesn’t care about this. He just wants to have the International Baccalaureate on the school’s resume without actually embodying or implementing anything it stands for. • The school claims to be “internationally minded” but it is obvious to me that there is an underlying tone of racism among the director and principals. An example of this includes not promoting the school’s assistant principal, who has been at the campus for decades and has had to basically run the school due to Rennard’s incompetence, because of her Indian heritage. She is the most experienced staff member in the school and also displays empathy and caring towards the staff and students, but this is completely overlooked by King. Another example is when the school made a promotional video to promote the campus. They made sure to include a staff member from Kenya, as in Rennard’s words, “we need to appear to be multicultural”, but in the final edit of the video, they overdubbed the Kenyan staff member’s voice to a typical American sounding vocalization. • New students aren’t given an induction of any kind. Their new teachers aren’t even told that a new student will be joining their class. No background information or anything. They just appear in the class one day and the teacher is expected to be able to integrate and educate these students with no prior knowledge of their educational background whatsoever. • King rarely visited the campus, but when he did, it was usually because he wanted to strike fear into the staff and students. Early in the year, he called a meeting with all the Saint Petersburg staff to basically tell them that if they didn’t work around the clock (even when they go home), they would be let go from their positions. The local Russian staff had a certain number of contracted hours in which they were meant to work for, but King told them that they basically had to work beyond this without any overtime because “they should be grateful for the number of holidays they get.” Then for the current school year, he decided to take away a whole three weeks of holidays from all staff, yet no extra pay or benefits. They still haven’t been paid their bonuses from the previous school year either. • Rennard created a parent committee called the Brookes Trust. This was meant to be implemented to help with effective communication between school staff and the parents of the students. Instead, Rennard wouldn’t allow any parents who voiced their concerns onto the committee, instead only asking mainly parents who spoke little to no English. Rennard even admitted publicly to the staff that she didn’t want certain parents on the committee because they ask difficult questions. Laura could never answer these parent questions and instead she would go red-faced and then moan and complain about those parents behind their backs once they had left. • Brookes like to claim that their “staff are provided with every opportunity to access professional and career development.” This is completely false. Not once did Brookes attempt to provide professional development for their staff. In fact, they actively went out of their way to block staff requests for the professional development they actually required to implement the International Baccalaureate within the school. • Brookes breaks the clauses in their contracts with the staff all the time. By the last count, they had broken several clauses in my contract within the first six months of being there. By the end, the contract might as well have been used as the elusive toilet paper everyone was searching for during the COVID outbreak as that’s all it was good for. • Even though they hire you for a year, you will not get paid for this time. They will use every trick in the book to get out of having to pay you what they owe. HR will feed you false information, mainly due to their excessive inexperience within the position. But what’s worse is when they are caught out lying, they cover that with another lie just to make sure that they keep their positions. This was often the case with campus HR representative. She seems to have no idea what she is doing. She makes up answers on the spot and then denies doing so later on. This became a large problem with some of the staff members who had to leave throughout the year as they never knew if the information they were told upon leaving the country was correct. I believe she is also a deceptive manipulator who will go out with staff members on a Friday evening after work just so that she can collect staff stories and anecdotes to feed back to Rennard and King to try and further her feeble position within the company. I could actually write a series of novels with all the examples of misdeeds in which Brookes continues to demonstrate on a daily basis. From all accounts from both campuses, things are just getting worse by the day. They do not care about their staff. At all. They are all expendable in their eyes. They continue to lay off staff in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic, giving them only three days’ notice that they are without a job, home, visa, medical care and that they need to leave the country. Members of staff have been catching the virus and having to be admitted to hospital for weeks, all due to the school not enforcing safe COVID practices, such as wearing a mask while on school campus. You can even currently see examples of this on their social media pages as they have a recent post of a visitor speaking with students on campus, not wearing a mask and in close proximity of the children. Whilst writing this review, tears came to my eyes many times. This place affects the mental and physical health of all who enter. The students and staff are struggling on a daily basis. I have heard from many of them and they are not happy there. They feel stressed and sick. Most have expressed that they will be leaving as soon as the global pandemic is over and that they can return to their home countries. I hope with their dwindling staff and student numbers, Brookes Russia take a deep look at themselves and make a change for the better. But this is wishful thinking. Their fragile egos won’t allow this. The school won’t change. School director Charley King won’t change. It will just continue to get worse under his rule. But based on how things are going, it will eventually implode upon itself. These poorly run institutions always do. Now, it’s only a matter of time...

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Convenient location. Well-equipped light classrooms. Large children's playground with football and basketball fields. All teachers are native speakers.

A real international school in St. Petersburg. Located in the same location as the Anglo-American School.