Maybe a cleaned-up Pascal would do the trick? It was a great teaching language back when I was a student. Low complexity, strong static typing, compiled language, no GC, pretty fast. No pointer arithmetic, harder to shoot oneself in the foot, but still easy access to pointers and easy ability to manage memory.

edit: What I meant by "cleaned-up" Pascal was addressing some of Kernighan's criticisms as seen in https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html (also, the Pascal syntax is a bit bloated)