The Starfish Country Home School Foundation was principally founded to help needy hill tribe children, not “regular” Thai children. In Maetaeng we are moving toward a 1:1 enrollment of hill tribe and day students, which is OK with me since we have found some very good day students too and overall we will continue to expand the total number of students to over 300 within six years, which will increase, not decrease, the opportunities for qualified hill tribe students..
However, in Chiangmai, almost all of our Chiangmai Starfish Learning Center students are not resident and I believe that few if any are hill tribe. Most are just from financially poor families. So far we have been completely unsuccessful expanding our recruiting in Chiangmai to children of well-to-do parents or to make it a center of excellence. I believe that next school year we will have only zero, one, two or three Chiangmai Starfish Home residents at the Chiangmai Starfish Learning Center. The residents of the Chiangmai Starfish Learning Center are aging so that many more are now in matayom than in pratom.