anglo chinese school (acs) international

today, i was at chip bee gardens when i caught sight of something unusual - some schoolgirls wearing the acs badge on their school blouses. there were also boys but that is not unusual. they were streaming out of a refurbished building at 61 jalan hitam manis.

i assume most of the students belong to nationalities other than singaporean. however, i think some of the students are singaporeans, judging from the way they speak.

two secondary schools used these premises in the past. the last school had actually merged with queensway secondary school in 2001. i think not many people are aware of the original secondary school that was built on that piece of land.

quiz question:

do you know the names of the two schools which occupied the same place at different time in the past?

answer: the original school was chip bee secondary school. then it became buona vista secondary school.

where have all these schools gone?

i was going to use this picture for a quiz when i discovered that chun see has a picture of the same building in his blog.

it then set me wondering how many a school has changed its location but there is no mention of its history and previous location in the school's present web-page.

these days, not only have many schools disappeared from the map of singapore but there are quite a number of schools that bear the name of a certain locality but have been relocated to somewhere else and this can be misleading if you based the location of a school on its name.

for example: commonwealth secondary is not at commonweath avenue but at jurong east. some other schools which are no longer at the places where their names were derived include dunearn, now at bukit batok west; river valley at west coast (temporarily at malan road); swiss cottage, now at bukit batok; tanglin secondary, now at west coast; and whitley secondary, now at bishan.

some schools have moved more than once. victoria school moved from tyrwhitt road to geylang bahru and thence to its present address at 2 siglap link. raffles institution moved out of bras basah road in the 70s to grange road and then to bishan.

some schools do change their names when they were relocated. thomson secondary is now known as north vista secondary. greenridge secondary in bukit panjang started in 1964 as dunearn secondary technical school. bukit batok east and bukit batok west were amalgated and resited and they became bukit timah primary school.

some of the secondary schools which do not exist anymore include bukit ho swee secondary, chip bee secondary, hwi yoh secondary, jalan lama secondary, kim seng technical, maju secondary, monk's hill secondary, pasir panjang secondary, rangoon road secondary, serangoon garden technical, tiong bahru secondary, upper aljunied technical, upper serangoon technical and willow avenue secondary.

some of the the primary schools that have disappeared from the scene include ama keng, anthony road girls', aroozoo, balestier boys', balestier girls', balestier mixed, batu berlayar, belvedere, birkhall, braddell rise, cairnhill, cambridge, cantonment, dorset, duchess, elling north, elling south, fowlie, geylang english, jalan daud, jalan kayu, jubilee, kwong avenue, lee kuo chuan, may north, may south, newton boys', owen, pearl bank, pearl's hill, permaisura, playfair, rayman, seraya, strathmore, sungei kadut, telok paku and tanglin tinggi.

i have not heard of some of these schools before, especially the vernacular schools. these include malay schools like kampong gelam, kota raja, padang terbakar and wessex estate; chinese schools like bin sin, chin hua, dji cheng, hua kiau and nong chong; and tamil schools like vallular, kalaimagal ang vivekananda .

so, where is the present princess elizabeth primary school?