Starbuck Middle School (Racine, Wisconsin)

Starbuck Middle School is a middle school, serving grades six through eight, located at 1516 Ohio Street in Racine, Wisconsin. Part of the Racine Unified School District, Starbuck is an IB World school, alongside RUSD's Jefferson Lighthouse Elementary School, West Ridge Elementary School, and Jerome I. Case High School. As of 2020, Starbuck is also the only middle school in the district to serve exclusively grades six through eight; all others are K–8 or 6–12 schools. The school is surrounded by Ohio Street on the east, Sixteenth Street on the south, Perry Avenue on the west, and Wright Avenue on the north.

History

By 1950, the Racine Board of Education owned two large plots of land outside the city of Racine that were reserved for future school construction, one on the western side of Ohio Street at Sixteenth Street, and the other west of Graceland Cemetery (now the location of Goodland Elementary School). In 1954, with the demographic effects of the "Baby Boom" starting to cause overcrowding in Racine's elementary schools, the Board stated that it was planning building a new junior high school either on the Ohio Street site or next to Jerstad-Agerholm Elementary School, in time for the expected peak of enrollment at junior high schools in 1961. The school board later decided that it needed to build both junior high schools to keep up with enrollment figures. It was noted by members of the Board that the 9.2-acre site they had purchased (comprising roughly the southern half of what is now the school property) was likely too small for the junior high school, so in 1958, it began seeking to purchase an undeveloped area to the north, on the southern end of the property of the Westgate Drive-In Theater.

S. J. Papas, owner of the theater, initially agreed to sell the plot to the school board on three conditions: "that the school system never object to the use of his property to the north as a theater or for other commercial purposes, make no attempt to have the theater annexed to the city[,] and would re-sell the plot to him at the sale price, if no school were built on the site by the end of 1963. Only the last restriction remained" by the time the sale was finalized on December 8, 1958, when the plot was purchased from Papas for $27,500. In the same meeting, the school board accepted a proposal by Malcolm Williams, an architect at the Warren Holmes Company in Lansing, Michigan, for the design of the building. In March 1959, the school board decided to name the new school after Frank R. Starbuck, longtime publisher of the Racine Journal Times, who had died in 1951.