By Arissa Binte Kamaruzaman (24A01A), Camillia Anum Mohamad Ashraff (24S03B), Annie Dang (24A01A), Vera Heng (24S03R)
There’s a price tag on everything. For RI’s upcoming major renovations and installations, the price tag is significantly heftier: a rotational displacement of classes.
The constant droning of equipment within the school grounds should have signalled to everyone that renovations are underway in several parts of the school. From Block A to Block J, this process is a large-scale one that will spill over from the holidays and affect the daily lives of Rafflesians.
One major change will be the reallocation of homerooms in order to accommodate classes whose homerooms are currently undergoing renovations. Some facilities within the school, such as Computer Labs and RDS Lite rooms will be converted into temporary homerooms, as there are insufficient physical homerooms for all classes.
To ensure that the reshuffle of homerooms is fair to all students, classes will be rotated into new homerooms every few months. While this may seem temporarily disruptive, students should keep in mind that it’s all for the better — everyone will enjoy the more spacious and conducive classrooms once renovations are completed.
The school has had to take into account various considerations, such as class size, subject combinations, and proximity to various facilities. Based on the information we have so far, Press has created an infographic to show the blocks affected in each stage of the reshuffle.
The Humanities Programme classes will be the first to move at the end of Term 2, followed by Block B and D classes, and finally, the Block A classes. It is expected that most classes will be moved to Raja Block at some point in time. Locations such as the ISH will be made into temporary homerooms for some classes, with its dividers becoming the new walls of the “classrooms”.
How will the student population cope in the coming months, uprooted from the comfort of their current classrooms and deposited unceremoniously into the unfamiliar terrain of their temporary ones?
When asked about the reshuffle, Rick Ng (24S06R) said “All we can do is hope that we aren’t moved to Raja,” while Allie Foo (24A01F) could not bear to say much more than “Oh.”
Hopefully, students take this in their stride, and perhaps even see this as an opportunity to appreciate the campus beyond the current blocks they’ve been assigned to. From the towering 7th level of the Raja Block to the vast, echoing expanse of the ISH, RI will still be home.
We are certain that many students will have questions about the reshuffle, and will want more information. Thus, Raffles Press has created a form for you to submit any questions you may have, which can be accessed at tinyurl.com/rafflesreshuffleqns. These questions will be forwarded to school management and addressed during Assembly at a later date.
In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, surely, a little reshuffle and reorganisation in our school lives wouldn’t hurt us all that much. Besides, what’s JC life without a little bit of spice?