Before we look at Nunu’s dismal performance in the role of school manager, let’s just look at the number of TBI procedures and policies that Ashley and Mariam broke in appointing Nunu.

1) Nunu had no CELTA or any TEFL certificate at all. They broke their own policies in appointing him.

2) Nunu had no management experience at all.

3) Nunu had not been ACTEL first. He leaped straight from part-time teacher (12 hours a week) to school manager.

4) They appointed someone who had had 9 sick days in his first 3 months at TBI Kelapa Gading.

5) He was never even interviewed for the position. 

6) His previous two supervisors- Cam and I- were of course never asked about his

job performance.

In summary, by appointing Nunu, Ashley and Mariam broke all their own policies in terms of the qualifications and experience of school managers. If he crashed and burned, they have only themselves to blame- C****** could see it coming a mile off. Why couldn’t they? The truth is, they don’t comply with their own standards time and again. Their complete lack of professionalism is very evident to anyone who knows them well.

So anyway, here is Nunu, without any education qualifications- not even a TEFL certificate- with a chronic record of absenteeism and a chronic case of “the sniffles”. He is sitting in the cockpit, with Ashley Platts besides him as co-pilot. They are on the runway, ready for take off. How do you think it is going to go?

                                        Nunu’s First Month as School Manager

My decision to resign caught them off guard. Lipi (another English teacher) and C****** left with me. That meant they were down to 2 expat teachers with 135 hours of week of classes on the schedule. It was a completely foreseeable disaster that they had, with typical blindness or indifference, stumbled right into.

Within a week Nunu had posted a job ad on the Living in Indonesia forum. (March 16, 2012). “Expats needed…desperately.” But the main action was taken by the owners. Mightily pissed off that Luke and Ashley had encouraged them to try and beat me into submission (I had resigned rather than meet the strange demands made of me in a meeting on Feb. 29, 2012) they had gone to Head Office and demanded Luke fix the situation. They had looked to Luke and Ashley to solve the mess they had created.

What Luke did was sent them two teachers from TBI Bandung who had no KITASes but wanted to stay in Indonesia- St**** and A***. Luke lied to them that TBI Kelapa Gading had illegal channels of getting KITASes as a way of luring them to TBI KG to fill the massive hole in the schedule. Luke is normally a smart operator and this lie was downright stupid. It was bound to fall apart in a short space of time. It is a sign of the great pressure Luke must have been under at this point that he allowed himself to be caught telling so obvious a lie. There was clearly no Plan B at that point.

So what happened to S**** and A***? The former lasted one week and the second lasted two weeks. At the end of their first week at TBI Kelapa Gading the remaining expats took them aside and said, “Nunu is lying to you. There is absolutely no way Nunu can get you a KITAS. The whole story is bullshit.“ The episode shows that within his first days in the job Nunu was already conspiring with Luke Preece to defraud TBI teachers. These people just go down the same crooked path again and again. Predictably enough the expat teachers stormed off from Kelapa Gading. I don’t know what happened to S*****, but A*** quit from TBI Kelapa Gading and was moved to TBI Kuningan for quite a while (without a KITAS) where he worked illegally with all the other VKU teachers, and then he finally got himself a job at the Seville School in Kelapa Gading, where he remains to this day. As for Nunu, he had proven himself as a liar to everyone in the staff-room within weeks of taking over. He was sowing the seeds of his own undoing very fast.

While the expats were leaving or planning to leave, what did Nunu do? Apparently, he stayed at home mostly! According to my source, he rarely came into work before noon and on the days when he had his In-House class at Pertamina, he sometimes didn’t come into school at all. C****** was proven right. He had told me that Nunu’s lax attitude to work would be the school’s undoing and it started at once. In fact, Nunu only gave himself 6 hours of teaching per week on the schedule, despite the fact that the school was in crisis with teachers leaving, and he only gave himself In-House classes. He wouldn’t teach “normal” classes at all. In contrast, I had been teaching 12 hours per week as school manager.

By the end of March it was obvious to everyone in the staffroom at TBI KG that Nunu was a disaster. I spoke to my former ACTEL, who had moved to a much better-paying job at Penabur International after completing 2 contracts at KG (I never once had a teacher break a contract with me as manager at KG). She said that Nunu called her up a few times asking her to do casual work to cover classes, but within a month she told him she wasn’t interested. The school was absolutely chaotic as she described it, with classes regularly being left without a teacher. She told me that twice TBI Kelapa Gading rang up and said, “H****, where are you?” in a panicked voice. They had put her on the roster to teach classes but had forgotten to ring her up and tell her about it!

She said that by the end of the first month, all the merged classes, missing teachers and general chaos was already taking its toll and the school was much emptier and quieter than when she had been a manager there just two months before! The inevitable had happened. Nunu was in the cockpit with his co-pilot, Ashley Platts, seemingly comatose and the school was headed towards a crash landing. As bad as the first month was, much worse was to come in April.

To Be Continued…