With 53 years of history behind it, Yusof Ishak Secondary School will soon be packing up and moving to a new home in Punggol.
The school, now in Bukit Batok and faced with falling enrolment, will relocate to a new site in the rapidly growing Housing Board town in 2021 to meet the increasing demand from families for school places there.
In a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Education said the school will not admit new Secondary 1 cohorts in the next two years at its current campus to minimise disruption to students' learning.
The school, established in 1965 as Jubilee Integrated Secondary School in Jubilee Road, in West Coast, was renamed in 1966 after the first president of Singapore, Mr Yusof Ishak, and opened by founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew that same year.
According to its website, it is the only school named after a president here. Mr Yusof, an alumnus of Raffles Institution and a former journalist, was appointed chairman of the Public Service Commission of Singapore in July 1959, and served as the first president of an independent Singapore from 1965 to 1970.
Since 2000, MOE has relocated about 60 schools, with some of them more than 10km from their original site. These included Mee Toh School, which moved from Kallang to Punggol in 2005.
With the relocation of Yusof Ishak Secondary, Punggol will house four secondary schools. The others are Punggol, Greendale and Edgefield secondary schools.
Punggol has seen rapid development in recent years, with young families moving in and facilities like a mega childcare centre being set up there. The estate will also see two new primary schools - Valour and Northshore - in 2020, MOE said. This will bring the number of primary schools in Punggol to 11.
Yusof Ishak Secondary and Valour Primary will be located at the junction of Punggol Central and Punggol Way, while Northshore Primary will be in Northshore Link.
Yusof Ishak Secondary alumnus Eric Lim, chairman of relocation company K.C. Dat, attended the school from 1965 to 1969, and is happy it is moving to a newer estate.
Mr Lim, 67, said: "It is good for us because Punggol is a younger neighbourhood with younger students. Hopefully, we can have a better student intake, and we can build up the name of the school."
About two years ago, Mr Lim, who is chairman of the alumni association, was concerned as many schools were being closed, and the school had falling enrolment.
"I was so afraid that the name of the school would disappear, so I fought very hard," said Mr Lim, who raised his concerns to MOE.
The school, which moved to Bukit Batok in 1999 and currently has 400 students, projects to have 1,300 at its new campus.
For one year in 2021, it will house its last batch of Secondary 4 students at the Bukit Batok site and its first batch of Secondary 1 students at the Punggol campus. MOE said it will facilitate the transfer of a small number of Secondary 5 Normal (Academic) students in 2022 - admitted this year - to other secondary schools in Bukit Batok.
The school's principal Maureen Lee said that new students and staff can learn about its history - including its name - through a heritage gallery at the new site.
MOE said the school will continue to host the Centre for Teaching and Learning Excellence, a programme set up in 2015 that exposes teachers to innovative ways of teaching in a classroom setting.
The school will have better facilities, including an interactive learning centre with video streaming capabilities and a learning laboratory with an attached observation room.
• Additional reporting by Jan Lee
