St. Hildegard's Boarding School

Out in the countryside, nestled in a valley among the mountains, there is an old brick mill building. It's left over from the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, when factories and manufacturing were at a height in [the region]. A river runs through the grounds, and there was once a water wheel that powered the carding mill there. This was the place where raw wool from sheep could be carded into usable fiber and then spun into yarn, dyed various colors, and sold to everyday folks to make their things out of. After the industrial revolution, when this labor moved elsewhere, this place, like so many others, was left abandoned to fall into ruin.   Thankfully, there was a local church who had other plans for it.   St. Mary's Catholic Church, affectionately nicknamed Our Lady of the Valley due to its location in the mountain valley, was home to a Benedictine monastery and convent with monks and nuns that ran the church, a local food pantry, and a tutoring service for the youth of the region. Along with the expansion of the factory, the church's weekend attendance grew as well. Of course, not all of the factory workers were Catholic, but with the sudden rise in population, the church naturally saw a rise in attendance each weekend. Soon, they were offering multiple Masses per Sunday so that they could fit all the folks in the factory just up the road who wanted to come to Mass. The church had been there since before the factory was built, but once the factory was in operation, the monks and nuns of St. Mary's truly began their mission in education. Child labor was, unfortunately, nearly commonplace at the time of the industrial revolution: children were expected to help their families. Some accomplished this by attending school only in the winters and staying to help on the farm during the growing and harvesting seasons, others became apprenticed at young ages to a local blacksmith, or cabinetmaker, or tailor, and still others went off to work at a factory and sent the majority of their earnings back home to help their families financially. As a result, the need for drop-in educational programs skyrocketed when the factory opened. Young folks who worked in the factory by day could come to the church in the evenings and be taught reading, writing, and functional math by the monastic community there. Parts of the basement of the church were converted into classrooms, with rolling chalkboards, bins of slates and boxes of white chalk, and kerosene lamps for light. Over time, the classrooms acquired such things as wood stoves for warmth and desks, tables, and chairs. Soon, the students were being crowded into the small rooms, and it became clear that this education effort was going to need a bigger space to work within if it was to continue.   When the factory closed, the church endeavored to raise a fund to purchase some of the old property and expand their education efforts. By the time all was said and done, it took [however many] years, but the church procured the factory lands and buildings on the near side of the river and began the next leg of their mission: building a proper school. The school took several years to be completed. The church community named it St. Hildegard's Boarding School, after St. Hildegard von Bingen. She is often described as a "Renaissance woman before the Renaissance;" she was known for her medical knowledge and writings in a time when such things were uncommon for women to be doing.   In [year], St. Hildegard Boarding School saw its first class of students: 12 young women, graduating with more knowledge than most ever learned at that time. It started off as an all-girls school, given that the majority of factory workers were women. The students lived in dormitories on the top floor of the main building, while the nuns who taught them continued living in the convent at the church down the street. They hired on residential staff to ensure that everyone was safe and taken good care of, with a resident director living in each of the two main school buildings. Eventually, the school grew. St. Mary's purchased the mill buildings on the other side of the river, effectively doubling the size of their campus. Once those buildings were finished being renovated, the school began accepting male students as well, who lived on the west side of the river and led lives that mirrored those of the girls. The monks of St. Mary's taught most of the classes for the boys. A while later, a couple of smaller old storage buildings, one on each side of the river, were converted into housing for temporary instructors. There were more students by this time than the monks and nuns could teach themselves, so these other teachers would come in for as little as a year or two to teach and then move along elsewhere.   As a boarding school, St. Hildegard's automatically gets a reputation for being a "rich kids' school," though due to the school's scholarship program, this is not exactly true. There are those that pay full price for the tuition because they are able to, but there are also plenty of students who receive financial assistance and are able to attend the school that way. Being a Catholic school, it also gets a reputation for being a less-than-welcoming place, but those who assume that are missing one key piece of information: the monastic community there is a Benedictine community. For those who may be unfamiliar, Benedictine monks and nuns have the guiding principle of "welcoming all as Christ," and this truly does mean all. Nowadays, there are clubs on campus for all sorts of interests and identities, including those for various religions other than Catholicism or Christianity, and there is one in the works for LGBTQ+ students.   Being located in a set of old mill buildings, the school grounds have a river running right through them that once had an old water wheel. Currently, the historical reconstruction section of the history department is working on restoring it back to working order. The river naturally divides the school in half, with a large bridge allowing passage from one half of the grounds to the other. On the eastern side of the river, the girls live in the top floors of the main building there. Across the river, the boys live in the adjacent building. Back in the day, the school was entirely split, with women and girls taught on the eastern half of campus by the nuns and boys taught across the river by the monks. This, in the minds of the monks and nuns of 150 years ago, allowed for students to "learn the skills required by their respective genders" and prevented girls and boys from "inappropriately fraternizing." Girls would learn more about cooking, sewing, and maintaining a household, while boys were learning more about farming, trade skills, and caring for livestock. However, those are now recognized as antiquated gender norms, and while some of these classes are still available, they are open to all students. The majority of classes are co-ed, but there are a few single-gendered classes that students can opt into (mostly for things like gym and extracurriculars such as sports and self-defense classes geared towards women). However, after the school day ends, students return to their respective sides of the river and are expected to stay there until the next morning.   As can be expected at any school, there are some unofficial student groups run with and without the faculty's knowledge. These are lovingly referred to as "the gangs" by the students there, and they encompass all aspects of life that are not covered by the school-sanctioned clubs. Of course, parts of this involves members of the boys' school and members of the girls' school hanging out after hours, usually in the woods, since that's the hardest part of campus for the staff to patrol. The Republic (yes, it's a Star Wars reference) is a large friend group of boys who try to take civic action whenever possible against the school's injustices. As far as the staff are concerned, it's just a bunch of kids who enjoy playing government, but they have made some pretty sizeable accomplishments in their endeavors over the years. Across the river, The Bracelet Brigade is a similarly-sized group of girls, given this nickname for the string bracelets they make for one another and wear all the time. Over the years, they've developed a color-coded system to use the bracelets for widespread communication, and being "initiated" into the brigade involves being given a set of these colored bracelets that have been made by current members. There is one group of mostly guys called the Build Guild, which consists of students who enjoy building and creating things. These are the ones who would've gotten all a's in wood shop. Their greatest project thus far has been a bridge over the narrowest parts of the river in the woods down a rarely-used path, far enough away from the school that the administration hasn't found it yet. Another small subset of students are the technological geniuses of the school, one of whom managed to smuggle in a laptop and an Ethernet cord to stay connected to the outside world in an environment where electronics are strictly limited. Yet another group is the resident nerd herd, who managed to find a decently-sized (for that area) cave in the woods, in which they play Dungeons and Dragons and other games. Part of their being in the cave is so that they don't get caught playing dnd together after-hours (and because who knows how a monk or nun might react to Dungeons and Dragons) and partially because playing dnd in a literal cave is really cool.   The school itself is composed of old, towering, beautiful brick buildings. Rumor has it that the girls' side has burned down twice and was rebuilt with the same bricks, and the back stairwell is supposedly haunted by an old nun. Naturally, the boys' side has their own haunting story: there's a monk who paces up and down the fourth floor hallway at night, and sometimes if you're awake and you're super quiet, you can hear him coming and going, back and forth. The buildings are quite tall for having only four floors, since the first three floors have such high ceilings. There used to be more floors to the buildings, but when they were converted from factories into a school, the floors had started to rot through, so the builders took that opportunity to retrofit the buildings to better reflect the monastic community's vision for the school. Additions were added to the backs of the buildings to include more housing for students as the school grew, making the buildings a bit of a maze inside. Whenever you think you've seen every room and back hallway, you still manage to find another. The stairwells still have their original wooden railings, sanded down and re-varnished again and again. The stairs are steep and tiring; they're old enough that they are in no way built to code, and some say they get steeper the higher you get, but no one has gone so far as to measure them to confirm this theory. If you don't have time to exercise during the day, the running joke is that you just have to hike up and down the stairs a couple of times and you're set. The school offices on the first floor have great arched windows in each of them, and tall wooden doors with old-fashioned doorknobs and keyholes. The second floor is home half to offices and the other half to In the campus coffee shop, located adjacent to the staff housing, there are some old photos hung on the walls that show what the school buildings once looked like when they were factories. These serve as a reminder to how St. Hildegard's got its start. The grounds contain a quad, sports fields, and a huge forest beyond the fields. There are some cross-country trails and hiking paths in the woods, some of which lead to the observatory — a stout, flat-roofed building that houses telescopes and other such equipment. Unlike your stereotypical observatory, this one has no windows and only one rolling door, with a large concrete patio surrounded by three-foot-high walls. Given the height of the walls, it's not too difficult to climb up onto the roof of the observatory, and sometimes students will meet up there to have late-night talks and stargaze, assuming they manage to sneak by campus security.   Some general information about the schools: Students there are in grades 7-12; it's a junior high/high school. All of these kids were in other schools up through 6th grade, whether that was public school, charter schools, Catholic schools, or some homeschooled students. As a result, there are a few characters that want to keep in touch with old friends from before their boarding school days. Required classes include your usual English, math, history, and science. Home Ec is another, and everyone looks forward to learning how to sew so they can put patches on their backpacks. There also are classes like Nature (this involves things like tracking animals, learning about different plants, wilderness first aid, and basic survival skills), art, and music. Students are able to choose things like whether they would like to sing, play an instrument, or work on computer-based music editing projects (or all of the above). None of these are electives; the school administration believes that every student should have an arts education and a nature-based section of their education.   [I'm still trying to decide exactly what the school's rules are regarding technology (cell phones, laptops, etc.)] Students do get a decent bit of mail. The mail room is tucked in a corner on the first floor near the cafeteria and auditorium, and each student has a small post office box with their own key for letters. When a student receieves a package, they get a little card slipped into their mailbox that says "You have a package!" and then they can bring that slip to the desk during mail center hours and give them their student ID number and mailbox number to pick up their package.   There are only a handful of buildings on the entire campus: the two main buildings, which house offices on the first floor, classrooms on the basement, first, and second floors, and dorms on the third and fourth floors. There are only three dedicated academic buildings: one for arts, one for sciences, and one for humanities (though most of the humanities courses are located in the two main buildings on each side of the river). The arts building is where the auditorium is housed, of course, with the cafeteria on the other side, and practice rooms, a few classrooms, and a smaller lecture hall. There are studio classrooms for art classes, including specialized studio rooms for drawing, painting, and pottery. There's also one larger room that is a blackbox theater, and this is where the majority of theater classes and workshops are held, along with rehearsals for shows before the show is "up on its feet" enough to be put on the stage in the auditorium. There's a mutual understanding among all of the theater kids at the school that nobody is made to walk back to their dorm alone at the end of rehearsals in the winter — rehearsals for theater always let out late, and it's always dark by then, and the arts building is a short hike down a small, dimly lit road that's mildly terrifying to the new students who haven't gotten used to the campus yet. Thankfully, sightings of things like bears on campus are uncommon and news travels quickly whenever something does get spotted. The sciences building has labs and whatnot, each floor being devoted to something different. The first floor is home to the biology department, the second floor is chemistry, and so on. Social sciences (things like psychology and physiology and sociology) are also in this building, along with the math detparment on the fourth floor. The humanities building has a history wing, a languages wing, a literary arts wing, and so on. [Most of this is still in development and needs to be figured out later on.]