Staggered fermions and their $O(a)$ improvements

Expanding upon the arguments of Sharpe, we explicitly implement the Symanzik improvement program demonstrating the absence of order $a$ terms in the staggered fermion action. We propose a general program to improve fermion operators to remove $O(a)$ corrections from their matrix elements, and demonstrate this program for the examples of matrix elements of fermion bilinears and $B_K$. We also determine the additional operators which must be added to improve the staggered fermion currents.