La Salle College, Hong Kong

As an ex-La Sallian teacher it was interesting to visit La Salle College Kowloon on the final afternoon of the conference. The De La Salle brothers had been active in other areas of Hong Kong previously, but this school was established in Kowloon in 1979. It caters for 1800 secondary boys with a primary school only slightly smaller across the road. It is a selective school but funded by the government and very competitive to get in to. The day we visited was the day enrolment offers had to be accepted and there were many parents, grandparents and boys there petitioning the Headmaster for one of the very limited places. Built around a large central garden with swimming pool, huge soccer field, and gym, its sporting facilities were very impressive, due partly to a very active and influential past students association. A data projector ceiling mounted in every classroom seemed accepted practice but other than that classrooms had 40 desks and chairs in rows and no desktop technologies. The library technology was similar to many Australian school libraries, and they used Alice for Windows as the automation system, but expressed a desire to move to a total self-service card-based system for physical access to the library as well as circulation.

The School Librarian who hosted us had been at the school for 25 years and managed an incredible load of English teaching, library classes and cataloguing, plus overseeing a team of 150 student librarians. Working in the library is an extracurricular activity on a par with music or a sport team and all students must be involved in a number of activities each week. This group is responsible for all the non-professional work of the school library on a roster system, and while we were there 10 boys were in during their holidays undertaking the stocktake. The incoming Chair of the Library Board who showed us around spoke of this role with the pride of an incoming school captain.

How many schools have an entry in wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Salle_College