Starr King Elementary, located adjacent to Starr King Open Space, offers a Mandarin Dual Immersion (MI) program, two classes for each grade, and a General Education (GE) track. Roughly 360 students attend the school, with access to courses in music, dance, gardening, and art.
Interviews with students and parents revealed a mix of feelings about the school.
“I like that there are nice people at Starr King,” said Hazel, a fourth grader, who considers Starr King a “fun school”. However, she complained that lunches are “low quality,” a common sentiment among the student body.
Wheeler, a fifth grader, said that “Starr King is a good school,” with top-notch teachers, though they could improve their approaches to discipline. For example, “when a child gets in trouble, they make the whole class get in trouble.” Wheeler hopes to make more friends in sixth grade.
Ana agreed with Wheeler about how faculty handle errant behavior. She “hopes the teachers can make up a fair punishment.” Ana’s favorite thing about the school is English Learning Development; a new program started this year, that helps Mandarin-speaking students advance their language skills.
“It’s a fun experience and I like meeting new people,” she said.
Aliyah, a graduate from the school’s GE track, said she wishes she was able to learn a language, and feels that the MI class is more privileged, consistently ahead of the GE class in every subject. In math, for example, she’d be learning multiplication while MI students were studying order of operations.
According to a parent of a GE pupil there are “constant fights between students” in the class and her child is “constantly stressed with all the violence.” She hoped that one day her youngster can “go to class without being scared.”
A student threw a book at the parent when they volunteered in the classroom. Scholars bicker over little things, end up fighting once or twice a week, with conflicts never fully resolved.
Another Starr King graduate felt that GE students received less support than the MI pupils. “For example,” she said, “the Chinese immersion classes would always be going on field trips without us.”
