Hong Kong’s Rosaryhill School to be taken over by private institution, prompting famous alumnus to call for more ‘energy’ in sponsoring body

A decision by a well-known Hong Kong school to be folded into a private institution has led alumnus and former top government adviser Bernard Chan to underscore challenges in the city’s education landscape and call for more “energy’ in the sponsoring body.

The Dalton School Hong Kong on Friday said it would assume stewardship of the privately funded Rosaryhill Kindergarten and Rosaryhill School in the Mid-Levels the next academic year. They will merge with Dalton’s primary schools and kindergartens on the other side of the city in West Kowloon.

Rosaryhill Secondary School will shift from an aided school to a privately funded one as part of the merger.

It was not immediately clear whether the change was due to falling enrolment, as Rosaryhill stakeholders offered competing accounts of the health of its student intake.

Chan, the former convenor of the key decision-making Executive Council, noted the religious body that sponsors the school, founded by the Dominican Monastery of St Albert the Great in Hong Kong in 1959, was not a professional body.

“The sponsoring body needs to be energised enough to address new challenges and I just do not think that as a religious group, the Dominican fathers are prepared to do that,” said Chan, who attended Rosaryhill Secondary School from 1977 to 1980. “After all, they are not professional, they are a religious group.”

While the Dominican Missions said the change in ownership was the result of falling enrolment, Rosaryhill principal So Pui-ting said in a statement on Sunday its numbers had been increasing and criticised the sponsoring body for failing to give enough advance warning to parents.

But her statement, which did not say how many students were enrolled, was pulled from the school website just hours after it was released.