Pros
The benefits are cheap, but the health insurance works best when used locally.
Cons
Everyone out there that goes for the money, benefits, and housing over doing research on a company first, please listen to me. This was the worst working experience of my life. I and my wife came during the Covid pandemic to work as houseparents. Our training consisted of the following: three days of online training by powerpoint, one day of descalation and containment training called SAMA, one day of CPR, and a day and one half that dealt with very basic procedures to follow in the home including how to administer medication. We then did forty-hours of what is called shadowing with a set of houseparents working a home. This is required by the state of Texas for licensing purposes. After this, we worked a home six days straight, which consists of working 96 hours over a six day period. It was terrible because unknown to us was the fact that clearly written Cal Farley policies were being broken in the home. Plus, we did not work enough with the other set of houseparents to establish and understanding of the kids routines as well as having the houseparents help us build relationships enough to transition. The only other time I recall working in the house with this set of primary houseparents was at Christmas when seven of the ten kids were gone. What were we going to learn in a home with three kids? As a beginning houseparent, you work two different homes for three days at a time. In the second home we were to work permanently, we received no introduction to the kids before being told that we had to oversee them. From the time we started in this home till the time we were laid off, we did not work with the primary houseparents at all except for an hour and a half and five of the kids were gone till 10pm. We were left to figure most things out on our own. We did have a supervisor. Oh, did I mention, however, that the supervisor has no houseparenting experience at all? So, let's review so far. Cal Farley had the hubris to believe that they could cultivate a good, long-term houseparent by taking a completely inexperienced couple, giving them minimal access and sometimes no access to working with the primary houseparents before overseeing a home long-term, and pairing them with a supervisor that had no housparenting experience. If this isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what is. I want to contrast the training at Cal Farley with a previous job. I once worked as a commercial insurance policy rater. To get trained to properly rate all of the products, I received ten weeks of classroom training before I was allowed to touch an actual policy, and insurance policies are inantimate objects not living, breathing humans with complex emotional and psychological issues to deal with who are classified as at-risk. We fell below standard on every marker on our 90 day review, but here's the thing about that; we fell below standard on items for which had never received any significant training. They decided that we needed a "review" of their therapeutic philosophy. This review came in the form of three different sessions about about an hour done in the form of powerpoint once again. Who did the training? You guess it; the supervisor with no houseparenting experience. The theoretical knowledge of the training was good, but because our supervisor had no experience as a houseparent and we never worked long term with any experienced houseparents, we gained no practical knowledge of how to implement the training. I want to say a word to Christians out there. Cal Farley tries to present itself as a Christian organization. The words "Christ-centered" actually appear in its mission statement. Sincere Christ-followers may read this statement and get the false impression that the houseparenting job is a ministry. IT IS NOT! If Cal Farley were a Christian non-profit ministry, the majority of the people they hire would be Bible-believing and following Christians. They are not. They hire houseparents that have no significant understanding of Christianity. They respect Christianity, but have no practical or theoretical understanding of salvation. As long as non-believing houseparents and supplementary workers go to chapel with the kids they supervise on their working days, this is all that is required. It is also worth nothing that some of the houseparents and youth workers visit strip clubs occasionally and other get drunk periodically to deal with the stress of the job. It is also important to mention that Cal Farley seems to suffer from investigation and lawsuits. Recently, a minimum standards investigation by the state was done to determine whether or not Cal Farley was providing the training it needed to so houseparents could have confidence in doing the job correctly. They are currently being sued by former residents alleging abuse. Just this year, Cal Farley was required by Texas to rewrite their houseparenting contracts because they were in violation of labor law. This raised the salaries of houseparents by thousands of dollars a year. In other words, Cal Farley was underpaying their employees. Even after the rewrite, houseparents still receive no pay for sixteen hours of the 96 hours they work per shift. My point is that people need to do their research to understand if they want their reputation attached to an organization that seems to have such problems. One last note. A month or so after our dismissal from the institution my wife had the opportunity to review her employment file. She found something strange in it. There were two performance reviews for two separate months that my wife never saw. They were completely typed. The date on the front was hand written by our former supervisor, but there were no signatures on second page of the review, not from my wife, the supervisor, or a witness. I cannot prove this and thus I am speculating, but I believe these performance reviews were put into her file after our dismissal in order to avoid criticism by the state in its minimum standards investigation against Cal Farley. Please do not let the promise of money cause you to lessen your research into a particular employer. Look at reviews anywhere you can see them. Look to see if there are investigations against the company and what type. Look for what isn't there. For example, their presence seems minimal on sites like indeed where reviews can be made by former employees. I found the job off of a site called Christianjobs.com. Also, look at turnover. If there is high turnover, you need to try to find reasons why. Cal Farley has high turn over. For example, for the six months we were there, four houseparent couples were fired and two left. One of the dismissed couples was us. That's one couple a month. Thank you all for your attention to this review. Please avoid the mistakes we made and reject this employer in your job search. Listing the a summary of the cons for our experience: Our supervisor has no experience in the job we were hired to do, alternate houseparents are the scapegoats for the primary houseparents mistakes in the houses, there are sixteen hours per shift for which you are not paid, there are two many inconsistencies in the way the house are run from home to home, our training was egregiously sub-standard. Cal Farley would blame it on Covid, but this is not an excuse when one is hired to work with at-risk youth.
