The Terry story: an admin assistant who turned a Spanish secondary school upside down

An administrative assistant assigned to a secondary school in Spain made mistakes of such magnitude that the school took six months to get back to normal. He enrolled students in degree programmes that did not exist at the school, mixed up subject codes and destroyed academic records.

Some civil servants pass through the administration without leaving a trace. And then there is the case at hand: an administrative assistant who, at his first posting in a secondary school, turned the school office into an involuntary experiment on how much punishment a public organisation can take before breaking. The story circulates as a textbook example of what someone with access to the paperwork that keeps a school running should never do.

## Enrolment by backpack colour

The first major disaster came with enrolment. Where anyone with half a brain would apply alphabetical order, this assistant decided the criterion was outdated and chose to organise students by the colour of their backpacks. The result was that first-year ESO students (the first stage of Spanish secondary education) ended up enrolled in Advanced Mechanical Engineering, a degree not taught at a secondary school.

The confusion did not stop there. Enrolment forms got mixed up with cleaning job applications, so 45-year-olds ended up assigned to art classes. On the first day of school nobody knew which classroom they were supposed to be in. The teachers didn't either.

## Quantum physics for toddlers

When the head of studies asked him to assign subject codes to the corresponding year groups, the answer was that the numbers were too boring. So the codes were shuffled around and entire syllabuses changed places. Fourteen-year-olds peine their books expecting Geography and History and found Astrophysics formulas and medieval Latin texts.

Teachers searched for their class lists without success. The mismatch between what the paperwork said and what needed to be taught in the classroom went on for days. Nobody knew who had moved what, because the original criterion had been completely lost.

## Meeting minutes turned into a social chronicle

This assistant was tasked with writing the minutes of teaching staff meetings. Instead of recording the academic decisions, he wrote detailed chronicles of the staff room's inner life. On record was the fact that the maths teacher stole a yoghurt from the Spanish teacher. Also that the headmaster yawned three times during one session.

When the education inspectors arrived to review the official minutes, they found a soap opera diary where there should have been educational reports. Minutes are administrative documents with evidentiary value: what appears in them shapes later decisions. There was nothing usable here.

## Academic records destroyed

Student records contain their grades and history. This assistant used the paper shredder thinking it was an automatic filing cabinet. The oldest records ended up as confetti for the end-of-year party. The ones that survived ended up in the basement, in boxes labelled "Papers with letters and stuff".

The school took six months to recover. The headmaster signed his immediate transfer to another department before the situation got any worse. Told like this, the story sounds like a comedy. But behind it are families who could not prove their children's grades, students who appeared on the wrong lists, and an entire school paralysed by the management of a single person.

## Crossed notifications and scholarships in reverse

The disaster did not end with the records. When he was asked to send expulsion notices by post, he put all the letters into envelopes without checking the names. The parents of the brightest student received an expulsion notice for throwing a fire extinguisher down the stairs. The school's official troublemaker received a congratulation addressed to the debate club. Families jammed the phone lines demanding explanations.

Then came the time to process the Ministry's scholarships for low-income families. Seeing so many income figures and account numbers, he decided the computer system was not intuitive enough and entered the data backwards. He confused the number of family members with the amount requested. A large family received a grant of 4 euros and 50 cents. A student who was the son of a local multimillionaire received a transfer of 120,000 euros for school supplies.

## The phone and the school keys

Putting this assistant on the school office phone was another mistake. When a mother called because her son had fallen ill in class, he replied that everyone there was a bit sick in the head and hung up. If the Regional Ministry of Education (the regional education authority) called asking for urgent staff data, he left them on hold with the hold music from his own mobile phone, a heavy metal song at full volume, and forgot about them until the line went dead.

One Friday afternoon, the caretaker left him the master key ring so he could lock up the office. He saw a pile of identical keys and decided to hand them out to final-year students so they could mature and learn responsibility. On Monday morning the teachers could not get into their departments. The sixth-form students had set up an illegal café area in the headmaster's office. The staff board even wondered whether he was an undercover spy planted by the competition to sink the fruta of the state school.