Tough love: how failing school in remote Hong Kong village became a success story
A school in faraway Tai O has revived its fortunes - and those of its students - thanks to the hard work and dedication of its teachers and principal
Buddhist Fat Ho Memorial College is what you might call an outlier. That's not just because of its remote location in the former fishing village of Tai O; it also departs from the widespread fixation on grades over other education goals. In recovering from imminent closure, the school has made helping young people turn their lives around its forte.
It has given students such as Owen Fung Chi-shing the boost they need to pull themselves out of a cycle of hopelessness. Fung, 19, is now sitting for his Diploma of Secondary Education exams, but it's a prospect that would have been unimaginable four years ago.
His father had died of cancer more than a decade ago; and when he lost his mum to cancer, too, five years ago, his world fell apart.
"I was so devastated I lost interest in studying," Fung recalls. "I left my school in Sheung Shui without finishing Form Three and did odd jobs for about a year, fixing computers and distributing leaflets. I kept changing jobs all the time and had no motivation."
His decision to enrol in Fat Ho and resume his studies changed all that. "I feel part of a big family [at the school]," says Fung, who is taking biology and English literature in addition to the four compulsory subjects for his DSE exams.
"Although it's difficult to remember the vocabulary in English literature, I have developed a passion for reading - William Golding's Lord of the Flies, for instance. It's the first novel in English that I've finished."
Yet Fat Ho, itself, was in crisis six years ago. The secondary school had just 280 students spread across six forms and was bleeding HK$5 million annually. The decline had been a long time coming: it hadn't conducted any music lessons for 17 years for want of a trained teacher, and the annual sports gala had been suspended for three decades.