Rosslyn Academy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosslyn Academy is a private Christian school in Nairobi, Kenya. It was founded in 1967. It is an international, coed, day school with a North American curriculum and classes from Kindergarten to twelfth grade. Enrollment is approximately 450, with a senior graduating class ranging from 35-50 each year. The majority of the student body is North American, with a number of South Korean nationals. Most of its teachers are North American certified. It is located in the northwestern outskirts of Nairobi, in Gigiri, a safe location of Nairobi near the United States Embassy and the United Nations Headquarters for Africa.

The site was formerly part of a coffee plantation.

Rosslyn Academy Logo

Administration Building

The school was originally founded as Mara Hills academy in northern Tanzania in the 1940s, as a one room school for the children of Mennonite missionaries. The school moved to its current location in 1967, and opened a boarding facility offering K-8 education. The school remained a boarding school into the 1980s when the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (now the International Mission Board) invested in the school to provide an American education for the children of its missionaries residing in the Nairobi area. This was also a critical financial move in the history of the school as it saved it from financial insolvency. In the early 1990s the Assemblies of God missionary sending agency also purchased a stake in the school. The school is currently jointly owned by the International Mission Board (by proxy through the Baptist Mission of Kenya), the Eastern Mennonite Mission and the Assemblies of God.

The school remained strictly a K-8 school until the 1990s. Most of the students transferred to the prestigious Rift Valley Academy upon entering ninth grade. However, the school gradually added a high school program and graduated its first senior class in 1991. Today the school offers many high school courses in the social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics, and literature and language. Rosslyn Academy also teaches a number of Advanced Placement AP courses ranging from physics and biology to foreign language.

The school is also now known for its extra-curricular sports program. The Rosslyn Eagles consistently place in the top of their leagues in both men's and women's varsity and junior varsity sports. The inter-schools athletic program includes men's and women's football (soccer), basketball, volleyball, field hockey, and track and field. Additionally, the men participate in an interschool rugby program. The Eagles' traditional rivals are the other large international schools in Kenya, namely the Rift Valley Academy Buffalos and the International School of Kenya Lions.