St James' Church Kindergarten Projects Further Growth

Friday, Oct. 30, 2009 Posted: 4:16:58AM HKT

St James' Church Kindergarten Principal Jacqueline Chung standing next to a knife bean plant grown by the preschool children at the school premises at 29 Harding Road. (Photo: CP)

At 840 children, St James' Church Kindergarten is showing no signs of slowing down.

With 1,800 children on the waiting list for the next three years, the leadership team at SJCK has reason to believe that the best is yet to come.

Already, an enrollment of 930 for next year has been confirmed with the opening of a third, late afternoon session at the preschool’s scenic location at 29 Harding Road.

A preparation for the kindergarten’s extension in the rebuilt St James’ Church in time for the 2012 enrollment, the extension will lead to SJCK breaking the four-digit mark with a projected enrollment of 1,050 in 2011.

When the preschool moves to the campus in the new church facility at Leedon Road in 2012, there will be a combined enrollment of 1,124 children. In 2013, this number will increase to 1,200 children, maximising the capacity at both locations. And these are just conservative estimates.

For this reason, the preschool leadership is already actively seeking out possible new locations to accommodate the growing enrollment. The team has in mind either a large campus or three to four smaller schools.

SJCK Principal Jacqueline Chung, 48, attributes the continuous and at times steep growth of the preschool to stable leadership, teamwork, vision, committed staff, faith, professionalism and staff mentoring.

She and her husband, Pastor Richard Chung, led the kindergarten in a dramatic season of growth in the last twelve years, which saw its enrollment more than triple from 263 children in 1996 when she first joined. If Richard provided the vision, Jacqueline was the executive on the ground.

According to her, it was Richard who developed the kindergarten, then a merely educational institution, into a ministry to the next generation.

At that time, the practice of the Religious Emphasis Week had prodded the couple to think about what they wanted to do in the preschool.

“[H]e and I were of the mindset that this whole idea of the Religious Emphasis Week shouldn’t really exist because it shouldn’t be emphasised once a year,” she expressed. “It should be an ongoing component in a church kindergarten because it is a church kindergarten and it is located within the premises. So there was a misnomer to have it once a year. Then what do we do for the rest of the time?”

With that, the school director and chaplain started to introduce a compulsory weekly chapel session and more deliberately incorporated Christian elements into the daily programme. The couple sourced for and found a language and phonics programme that interwove 64 biblical character traits; the preschool is using the programme till this day.

“That was a major turning point, I felt,” said Jacqueline, who has a 22 year-old daughter studying abroad.

The preschool also saw an overhaul of its teachers. Previously, the kindergarten had many non-Christian staff.

Armed with the conviction that teachers had to embody what they taught, especially when it came to the Christian faith, the couple decided that the preschool would hire only sincere Christians.

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Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com