Word: starrs
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...happy to see your notice and mention of Starr Commonwealth, and to find Uncle Floyd's picture in the Aug. 4 TIME . . . but I wish the school had been presented in a somewhat different light...
Future Comfortable. Through the sale of special Christmas seals, Starr takes in $100,000 a year, which pays most of the school's expenses. He bought more land, overlooking a large lake, built ten "cottages" on his campus, furnished them with rugs, books, and pictures. When his school expanded to 150 pupils, he took over five more houses, dotted over the rolling farmland beyond his campus. He hired nine teachers to instruct the boys...
Many of his boys, though in their teens, can hardly read or write when they arrive. That doesn't bother Starr, but he does insist on an I.Q. of at least 90. Most kids stay about two years: Starr believes that it is as bad to stay too long as to leave too soon ("They get over-institutionalized"). He thinks it easier to influence a boy at 17 or 18 than at twelve...
...uniforms and live behind no walls. Between classes, they work on the school farm, sell whatever milk or food they cannot eat or drink themselves (the farm made over $6,000 last year). In the evenings, they listen to music ("Learning to love beauty is essential," says Floyd Starr) or crowd into "Uncle Floyd's" office for popcorn and cider...
...Floyd Starr's 1,200 alumni, he estimates that 90 to 95% have gone straight. He gets about 1,000 letters a year from them; many are now respected doctors, lawyers, mechanics, farmers. Last week, after 34 years, Floyd Starr was sure that his school was "well out of swaddling clothes." There was just one more thing he wanted to build, and he was busy raising the money to build it-a chapel...