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Hong Kong teacher and librarian killed in campus fall ‘did a demanding and misunderstood job’
- Lam Lai-tong, 48, worked in the school library as well as teaching Chinese at the Tin Shui Wai school where she died last week
- One librarian says her colleagues are vulnerable to overwork
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A teacher who fell to her death on campus last week had been doing a demanding job which few colleagues understand, a campaigner for the city’s school librarians has said.
The deceased also worked as a librarian, a job which leaves staff open to being overloaded with work, Susana Lau Po-shan said.
Chinese-language and library studies teacher Lam Lai-tong, 48, died last Wednesday at the TWGHs Leo Tung-hai Lee Primary School in Tin Shui Wai, after falling from a six-storey campus building. Family members told reporters she had been under a great deal of stress at the school, where she had worked for more than two decades.
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Senior officials at the school’s sponsoring body, Tung Wah Group Hospitals, said on Sunday they would set up an independent panel to look into Lam’s death, and the principal Law Yuen-yee “needed some rest”.
On Monday Lau, convenor of the Hong Kong School Librarian Concern Group and a primary school librarian of 20 years, told a radio programme: “The greatest feature of the job as a school librarian – other than it being very demanding – is that no one, from your principal and programme leader to your ordinary colleagues, really understands what you are doing.
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