THIS FEATURE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN JOURNEYS SUMMER 2022.  

SAS Reimagined is the culmination of years of research, community engagement, and collaboration with learning design specialists. Students, parents, and educators took part in our engagement sessions, and the community banded together to help conceptualize this project through design advisory groups. Our aspiration is to create the best possible experiences for all our students, and the project will result in a significant increase in learning and play space, development of first-class technology, science, arts and athletics spaces, and a much greener, more environmentally sustainable campus.

As we engage in the design work, there are two high-level lenses we use as guides:
• Every space is a learning space. Whether you are on a playground, in a classroom, in a design lab, or grabbing lunch in the cafeteria, you are in a learning space.

• A variety of learning environments are essential to support all learners. Learning environments must support learning that is active and collaborative, quiet and personal, and the variety of other learning experiences important for each individual student.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2021–22
As we shared last fall, ensuring safety and minimizing disruption are important priorities throughout this entire project. The SAS Reimagined team has worked closely with local construction specialists to ensure safety and security during construction, and we are grateful that our students and educators have had very few concerns about disruption over the past year.

High School
One of our objectives has been to bring benefits as early as possible during the construction process to our high school students. This year we opened Cafe Shiok!, a new bakery and dining area linked to the high school library, and it has quickly become a popular collaboration space for students. Our completely remodeled Khoo Teck Puat library was unveiled and provides students with open and private study areas, collaborative rooms of various sizes, and significantly more natural light. We also opened our new west fields for our athletes and high school PE classes to use. These fields gave our athletes the opportunity to train and participate in games as we began to hold more competitions during the second semester.

Middle School

In the middle school, several donors brought new playspaces to life for our students to enjoy during their breaks. These have become great community-building spaces.

Elementary School
We kicked off the year with a fun groundbreaking ceremony for the new building currently under construction. While it remains our goal to open the new elementary school in August of 2023, the severe manpower shortages and supply chain disruptions in Singapore’s construction industry continue to pose challenges to this schedule.

The team will continue to update the community on the status of this opening. Should the move-in to the new elementary school not be possible until later in the year, we will continue to operate in our present elementary school. The benefits of the new building will be delayed, but our children will continue to be well-provided for in their current environments.

One of our key findings regarding the development of classrooms in recent years is our need to ensure that students can have fully enclosed classroom spaces that are quiet and separated and also can utilize collaborative, shared spaces that are flexible enough to meet the specific demands of the lesson. Some of our past designs did not have this flexibility or did not provide for each class to have its own separate, fully enclosed, quieter space. We have sought to incorporate these conclusions in this new design.

One more fun highlight was the launch of our community garden. This garden offers both SAS and local Woodlands community members an opportunity to come together as they tend small garden plots. We were fortunate to have our local Member of Parliament, Ms. Hany Soh join us for a launch event in the spring.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN 2022–23
Our facilities and construction teams have a big summer ahead as we plan to complete construction on several large projects.

Our high school stadium field grandstands will come online next year and we are excited to have our athletes competing with fans in the stands once again! The new 50 meter pool and aquatics center will be an incredible gift to our athletes for years to come. We will also welcome a new high school dining space overlooking the pools called the Eagle's Perch. Our APEx fitness and wellness center will also open next year and will be the center of wellness for our entire community with weight rooms, a running track, yoga studios, and more. We are looking forward to welcoming all community members to this space.

This summer, we will complete the last of our seventh grade learning communities and our new ninth grade humanities classrooms. These spaces include separate, individual spaces that may be used for quiet, reflective work, and space for shared learning opportunities. We look forward to seeing these new spaces come alive next year and to continuing our partnership with parents in the work ahead.