Hong Kah Secondary School
Hong Kah Secondary School (HKSS) is a co-educational government neighbourhood school at 931, Jurong West Street 42, Jurong, Singapore. Subjects offered include Triple Pure Sciences. There is a wide variety of CCAs.
History
HKSS began operations in 1994 with 14 Secondary One classes. There were 6 Express, 5 Normal (Academic) and 3 Normal (Technical) classes. It was the holding school for Pioneer Secondary School, which moved to its own school in 1995.
Hong Kah is named after the old Hong Kah Village in Jurong. When Jurong was redeveloped, the original village and its inhabitants were relocated but the name was retained for the sense of rootednes to its history.
In 1997 the enrolment increased to 1,200 pupils.
Discipline
Hong Kah Secondary School makes full use of corporal punishment (for boys only) to maintain discipline. Its website says "The school will administer caning (for all serious and repeated offenses) on the day the offense was committed, with or without parents' consent. Counselling will be provided after the caning is carried out."[1]
The punishment is administered to the student's clothed buttocks, normally either by the Discipline Master or the Operations Manager. The usual number of strokes is from one to four. The caning is done either in the school office or in front of the offender's class, or in the corridor outside class, or in very serious cases it may be carried out in front of the whole school ("public caning").
For failing to submit assignments on a third or subsequent occasion, boys receive one stroke of the cane and girls get two days' community service. Boys receive two strokes for smoking, in or out of school (girls: 3 days' suspension). Caning (3 strokes) and counseling may be administered for truancy. [1]
In order to encourage punctuality, penalties for lateness have been progressively tightened up in recent times. A while ago, the punishment for being late to school 10 times in a term was one stroke of the cane. This was changed to a stroke on the sixth occasion of lateness in a term. Since the new clampdown on punctuality at the beginning of 2012, the provisions have been made still stricter, and now the punishment for arriving at school after the flag-raising ceremony has started (but still in time for lessons) a fourth time in a term is one stroke of the cane (boys) and one day's external detention (girls). For the fifth time it is two strokes for boys and two days' detention for girls, and at the sixth or subsequent tardy the pupil is suspended. [1]
All the above applies to students who still arrive in time for curriculum hours. Boys who do not do so now receive two strokes of the cane even on the first occasion and the same on every subsequent occasion. Girls in this situation must wear a "corrective vest" for the whole day. [1] This makes HKSS probably one of the strictest schools in Singapore as far as caning for lateness is concerned.