The Complete Catalog of American Wizarding Schools

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I hope you come back someday, because this blog has such potential!

Aren’t you the sweetest! I will I promise. New content on the way later this summer after I finish moving. I miss working on it and I already have pages and pages about the next schools to be featured!

❤️ - ProfR

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Student Life

Students at RIME are well-known for being an independent and intelligent, if stubborn group. They tend to be opinionated and assertive, passionate and personable. Instructors foster this passion in the classroom by allowing advanced students to guest-lecture to younger students and by promoting an educational environment which is conversational and flexible. This causes students to be very invested in their education and consequently hard-workers who delight in being well-informed (and being right) in the classroom.

Students are assigned to one of the three large dorms (Maruyama Hall often called “Maru” for short, Wood House, and Skyline) on the outdoor campus by random lottery and students are encouraged to bond with those within their dorm as well as more specifically on their own floor. Each dorm contains several small sitting rooms along with students’ individual rooms (each student has two roommates). In the middle of the three dorms is a shared hall, Edwards Dining Hall, which serves three meals a day and stays open to provide snacks and study space throughout the day. The three dorms have a fierce rivalry which plays out in classes and on the Quidditch field, though Edwards Dining Hall is well-respected as a neutral space where students mingle to study and eat at a number of small tables.

RIME has a fairly good quidditch league, one which pitches the three dorm teams of Maru, Wood House and Skyline against each other. The rival dorm games are well-attended but are mostly good-natured excuses for students from all dorms to blow off a bit of steam. While the quality of play within the school is respectable, the once a year event which pits the best players from RIME against rival Southern California school Anacapa School of Magic better shows the strength of RIME quidditch players. School lore tells us that this rivalry began in 1929, two years after Anacapa was founded, when a ragtag group of RIME students, now called the Skyline Seven, took advantage of the semi-open-campus policy at RIME to spend their weekend flying over a hundred miles to catch a glimpse of the new Californian school (and probably cause some trouble there). Tired and bedraggled from the long flight, heavy winds, and cold sea air, when they touched down on Anacapa and triggered the wards, they were in no state to cause much mischief at all. Rather than punishing them directly for what amounted to breaking-and-entering, the headmaster of Anacapa decided they would be allowed to floo back to RIME, no questions asked, should they immediately take on the Anacapa students in a Quidditch game and win. After all, they had been confident enough in their flying to believe they would make the round trip between the schools in one weekend. Surely a bit of Quidditch would be easy. This, predictably, did not go well for the RIME students, who were already exhausted. They were thoroughly and embarrassingly defeated (and later suspended for their antics), and since that year the two schools have staged a yearly rematch on the anniversary of the Skyline Seven’s flight.

Gender-neutral uniforms consist of practical jeans or linen pants that cinch at the ankles, good for exploring the forest and breathable for the hotter springs and summers of northern California. Students wear black t-shirts (either v-neck or crew) with the school crest emblazoned over the left breast pocket and can wear a flannel button up and/or a wool coat over the top. Due to heavy fog, mornings in RIME can be cold and wet and so students are also required to own a lightweight raincoat with the RIME crest. Students are permitted to (and frequently do) accessorize with their own shoe-choice, jewelry, hats etc. Accessories in the color associated with their dorms are popular, especially the braided bracelets that have become a sort of unofficial piece of the uniform among students and help them to identify which dorm another student is in.

The school largely gives students free range to explore the wilderness around the school after the completion of their third year. Students are well-versed on popular muggle hiking routes, which they must avoid. Otherwise students often spend their off hours in the nearby hot springs, or enjoying the rivers, forest and ocean -- flying, hiking, fishing, whale-watching, sunbathing, swimming, and rock-climbing. The school sponsors trips to San Francisco to explore magical and nonmagical neighborhoods three times over the course of the school year. Students are expected to be self-starters, to value their education, extracurricular activities and health. Rule-breaking is strictly punished, especially since rules tend to allow students more freedom than at many other schools. Contrary to the common stereotype of RIME students, who are portrayed as slightly wild or feral, opinionated and sharp, most RIME students are hard workers with a profound sense of wonder and a desire to explore their world both physically and intellectually.

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Academics and School Organization

RIME has a particular reputation amongst American wizarding schools as one of the premier institutions for students with an interest in Herbology and/or Magizoology. RIME’s founder and his descendents had a great interest in maintaining a symbiotic relationship between the school and the surrounding natural environment. Naoki Maruyama’s love of California’s rugged coasts and forests influenced his decision to make the protection of both magic and mundane animals native to northern California one of the missions of the institution. RIME alumni were instrumental in pushing the non-magical government to designate many of the areas where Redwood trees grow as national parks and preserves.

In their first year, students are required to sign up to hand-raise a injured or abandoned nonmagical or semimagical creature native to the surrounding environment of RIME. They are expected to attend to the care of these animals without the use of magic. Common choices for students include everything from beetles, falcons, owls, deer, and rabbits to the endangered California Condor, California Sea Otter and Mountain Lion. This exercise teaches students responsibility for wildlife, an understanding of their place within the natural ecosystem, and helps them bond with fellow classmates. Students with like animals often band together to take turns in caretaking duties and swap secrets for helping their animals grow up healthy, strong, and ready to be reintroduced to the wild. If their animal reaches maturity or is healed before the end of their tenure, students are encouraged (though not required) to take on the care of a new animal.

Students attend RIME from the age of ten onwards, and are required to spend at least half their summers at the school so that they can care for their animal companions (though the school gives a particularly long winter break in order to compensate for the time spent at school over the summer). Students receive their notice of selection through firecall from one of the numerous faculty members of the RIME school. Students of any nation may apply for selection to RIME, they need only send in the name of the student by the student’s fifth birthday. Courses at RIME are currently offered only in English, but the school is considering (due to considerable interest) offering magical translating services for both Asian and Latin American students.

Due to its close association with its natural environment and with the animals that populate that environment, it is unsurprising that RIME boasts the largest number of students that become animagi. Demand for instruction on animagus magic was high enough that in the 1960s, RIME began to offer a two-year course on the transformation magic for those that scored high enough on their Transfiguration exams.

Students are required to take core subjects (Transfiguration, Herbology, Charms, Magical History, Creature Care, and Potions) for the first five years of their tenure at RIME. Defense Against the Dark Arts, according to the educational philosophy of RIME, is not its own subject. This is because RIME believes DADA incorporates various different types of magics which are better taught by faculty specializing in that specific type of magic (i.e. there are defensive charms taught in a traditional DADA class that are, at RIME, a part of the Charms program) After this, they sit an oral and practical set of examinations. Depending upon their scores on these exams they partner with faculty to design their interdisciplinary course load for the last three years of study at RIME, specializing based on their career goals and intellectual aptitudes. At the end of their eighth year, RIME students are expected to propose an addition to magical knowledge in their specialty, either expanding a set of widely held theories, contesting them, inventing a new spell, potion etc. or demonstrating a new application of existing magical theory.

RIME offers the following subjects to advanced students in their final two years, along with the ability to combine courses under the watchful eye of a faculty advisor:

--Advanced Transfiguration

Human Transfiguration and Animagus Advance Class

--Advanced Herbology

Herbological Research and Theory

Herbological Cultivation and Preservation

--Advanced Potions

Experimental Potions

Potioning Theory

--Advanced Charms

--Combat Magic (Including Defensive and Offensive Spells and Serving as a Training Course for a Career in Magical Law Enforcement)

--Advanced Magical History and Policy

--Advanced Creature Care

History of Creature Care

Magizoology Policy

Care of Dangerous Beasts

--Pre-Healer Training

--Advanced Astronomy

--Nonmagic Studies

Nonmagic Sociology and Relations

Nonmagic Technology Adaptation and Integration

The RIME school crest features a Redwood tree with a wand and a quill (which are no longer used in the school) crossed over it and stars above. The school colors are a rusty red (adopted by Maruyama dormitory), a deep green (usually worn by Wood House) and a inky blue-black (most loved by Skyline students).

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The first school in the catalog is Redwood Institute for Magical Education, otherwise known as RIME. Here follows a brief history and information on its location. Posts on RIME’s Academics, School Organization and Character, as well as Student Life are forthcoming.

Founding/A Brief History of Redwood Institute for Magical Education 

RIME was founded in 1865 by Naoki Maruyama, who arrived in California in 1851 at the age of 19, a wizard fresh from his education at Mahoutokoro who heard there was money to be made in the California Gold Rush and figured he would be at least as good at digging it out of the hills as the muggles. Naoki fell in love with the rugged attitude of the newly blossoming San Francisco, with its hard-drinking miners and simple food, with its relentless spirit, with its fierce and often aggressive independence, with its aura of possibility.

And so Naoki settled, as most miners did, in San Francisco, but unlike most miners, he actually did make a fortune there. Naoki fared much better socially in San Francisco than most immigrants, largely due to his willingness to help other miners, to point them in the direction of large gold deposits and occasionally to be around when the rock magically seemed softer, the hike quicker, the air less chilled. Camped out in the hills, Naoki lived on black coffee, sourdough and dried beef, along with the occasional rabbit stew that could be cooked up over an open campfire, one eye on his claim.

Flush with gold, in 1856 he settled down with a muggle woman and daughter of a hotel-owner, Eleanor Fowler. Together they built an enormous house along the coast, near China Beach on the northwest side of the city. Soon, Naoki’s younger brother Hibiki moved to California and set up in the house. Hibiki and Naoki Maruyama, who always talked about organizing a magical community in the San Francisco region, were spurred into action once the elder Maruyama had his first child, a daughter named May. May was born in 1859 and displayed her first signs of magic by 2 years old (she turned the family cat purple). Eleanor and Naoki Maruyama couldn’t face the idea of ever being parted from her, and later, her younger brother Ben. Couldn’t face the idea of sending them to a coast that they’d never seen, where the mountains were cold and snowy (Illvermorny) or to a country whose language their children barely spoke (Mahoutokoro). Naoki, who saw himself not just as an American but as a Californian by this time, decided it was time for his coast of the United States to have its own magical school.

The school started in their house in San Francisco, with only the Maruyama children and one other wizarding child from the other side of the city, an Italian girl by the name of  Lillian Borsellino. Eventually the flashes, bangs and general mayhem of the three young wizards attracted muggle attention, so the family (along with Hibiki and his wife and infant son) bought a huge expanse of wilderness in Big Sur, where construction on the RIME campus officially begun in 1865.

Obviously, Naoki served as the school’s first headmaster, followed after his retirement by co-headmasters Ben Maruyama and Lillian Borsellino, who married in 1887. By the time the two former students took the reigns of the school in 1897, the school had expanded to host nearly sixty students and was comprised of several buildings, one of which still housed the Maruyama family. This building has since been converted into a dorm, but is still named after the founding family, Maruyama Hall. Carrying on in his father’s tradition of cultural exchange and inclusivity, students from any country are allowed to attend RIME, which has given the school a magical signature of its own particular flavor. The school reached the size it is today by the middle of the 20th century, encompassing seven large buildings, three of which are dorms. It is, regardless of how you date the actual founding (either at the Maruyama home or the campus in Big Sur), the oldest and most prestigious formal wizarding school on the west coast of the United States.

Graduates of RIME have gone on to become politicians, great inventors, scholars, and artisans. Andrew Rowan, noted magical herbologist and RIME graduate discovered new uses for over 200 species of local plants and fungi in addition to identifying and isolating the mental clearing powers of banana slug mucus elemental in Damocles’ invention of the Wolfsbane Potion. Other notable alumni include Louis M. Martin (Vice-President to Madam President Seraphina Picquery), Aisha Kanaan (the first American Quidditch player drafted to play in the British and Irish Quidditch League in 1903), Niko Giacometti (inventor of the Disillusionment charm), and Anna Marie Cho (legendary frontwoman of San Francisco punk band Confringo!) among others.

Approximate Location (please respect our schools and keep these locations secret)

RIME is located in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in Big Sur, California, along the coast and tucked away a few hours south of San Francisco. Specifically, the school can be found somewhere close to the arrowhead bit of land where the Big Sur River and Lion Creek meet, near Sykes Hot Springs.

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A Brief Introduction to the Catalog

Do the math, there are way too many wizarding children in the United States for Illvermorny to support on its own. Okay wait, math is perhaps not the right way to peak your interest. But let’s do the math quickly anyway. Stick with me, the magic is coming.

It is extremely difficult to accurately estimate the population of the wizarding world, partially because we have conflicting numbers from JK Rowling herself. She has said (in an interview with Scholastic from 2000) that she estimated the population of Hogwarts while Harry was there to be around 1,000 students. Assuming that there are a few students that are sent to the European continent or schooled at home, and that (as in current estimations) the percentage of Hogwarts-age students is ~11% of the total population, that would give us a wizarding population in the UK of somewhere in the range of 12,000-13,000.

If we apply the same proportions of magic/muggle (.0003%) to the US population, we get a US magical population of somewhere around 96,400. Recent census data tells us that in the United States, around 13% of the population is Hogwarts-aged, giving us a magical school population of 12,500.

However, JK Rowling has also said that there are ten times more Muggles than there are wizards in the world which would give us something more like 32 million wizards in the United States and 417,000 school-aged kids. There’s a big difference between 417 thousand and 12 thousand but either way, there are just way too many students for one school, roughly the size of Hogwarts, to accommodate. At the low-end of the estimates, you need around 10-12 schools to properly educate the number of wizarding kids in the country, at the high end, you might need several hundred.

So imagine for a second, what do all of those schools look like? Where are they hiding from the eyes of muggles, what are their educational emphases? Their history? Who founded them, who attends them? What kinds of spells or magical inventions have come out of them? Who teaches the wider magical world?

For the sake of argument, this blog is going to assume that the magical world needs more schools, that specifically the US needs more wizarding schools. So let’s make them. Together. That’s the project of WizardEdu.

Enjoy.

-ProfR