Saint Drogo’s School

Saint Drogo’s School is a prestigious Catholic school whose apparent educational authority is entangled with expensive admissions, donor privilege, financial fraud, and institutional self-protection. For Six, it is first an inaccessible destination that Bael-Sharoth secures through money and pressure; over the following disputes, it becomes the setting in which he exposes corruption, takes control of the school board, and remakes the campus so thoroughly that it is nearly unrecognizable when the students return.

Reputation and Admission

Saint Drogo’s School is presented as an elite institution whose name carries enough prestige to make parents anxious about gaining entry. During a discussion about local education, Julia Stein identifies Jonas Elementary as the area’s best elementary school, while Jim Stein admits that his child failed to get into Saint Drogo’s. He describes the school as prohibitively expensive even for families capable of meeting its standards, establishing admission as a competition governed by both status and money.

The school’s public image also explains the pointed sign outside the Arms of the Angels Adoption Agency, where Maharet Flameheart and Bael-Sharoth are arranging matters connected with Six. The elaborate name prompts Bael’s complaint that it is too obvious, while Maharet characterizes angels as lacking subtlety. The school is not itself an angelic institution, but its proximity in the surrounding episode places it within a world where grand moral labels conceal force, hierarchy, and practical bargaining. Its Catholic prestige similarly functions less as a guarantee of virtue than as a visible authority that characters can invoke and exploit.

Bael-Sharoth approaches the school without an appointment to enroll Six in classes. He respects Catholic monasteries as historical places of learning because they preserved literature and ancient knowledge through the Dark Ages, including subjects from metalwork to mathematics. His appreciation is undercut by his bemusement at the marginal drawings in surviving manuscripts, where armored knights fight monstrous snails and rabbits wield spears. That contrast gives the school’s educational ideal a characteristically Bael-like double edge: Saint Drogo’s represents genuine cultural preservation, but the institutions associated with learning are also capable of eccentricity, vanity, and absurdity.

Money, Access, and Institutional Compromise

Bael-Sharoth’s admission negotiation reveals how Saint Drogo’s converts philanthropy into access. The administrator, Ms. Kitch, agrees to see him because a major investment firm has unexpectedly donated more than one hundred thousand dollars. After the money is processed, only hundreds of dollars will supposedly remain available for supplies and desks, while the rest is directed toward Ms. Kitch’s new Porsche. The school’s charitable language therefore conceals a material arrangement in which institutional resources and personal luxury are difficult to separate.

Ms. Kitch initially treats Six’s homeschooled background as a liability and prepares to reject her because the school year is about to begin. Bael-Sharoth reverses the situation by implying that the donation can disappear if his daughter is not admitted. Ms. Kitch quickly recognizes that his departure could cost her the money connected with the new car and asks whether he works for Sheriff Investments. Bael confirms that he owns the firm and explains that his advisers require the company to donate part of its revenue for tax purposes. He presents the school as a logical destination for that money because Six is a bright child, but the underlying bargain is unmistakable: the school receives charitable funds, and Six receives privileged admission.

This exchange makes Saint Drogo’s a place where educational merit, parental influence, corporate philanthropy, and coercion overlap. Bael does not merely appeal to Six’s ability; he tests whether the administrator’s commitment to standards survives the withdrawal of money. Ms. Kitch’s immediate change of attitude demonstrates that it does not. The school’s prestige remains intact on the surface, but its gatekeeping system is shown to be negotiable when confronted with sufficient economic power.

Financial Collapse and the Board Struggle

The school’s deeper crisis emerges after its principal dies. An examination of her records reveals that she had embezzled an enormous sum, leaving approximately three-quarters of the funds intended to carry Saint Drogo’s through the coming year missing. The consequences are immediate and institutional: budgets must be tightened, classes condensed, and some parents disappointed. The administration relies on established systems to decide which children will remain and which will be excluded, while the highest donors are exempt from the cuts. Even the supposed rules of austerity are shaped by wealth.

Ms. Kitch has falsified the donor records, adding another layer of corruption to the school’s financial emergency. The institution is therefore threatened from several directions at once: the principal has stolen its reserves, the admissions hierarchy protects wealthy families, and internal records have been manipulated to preserve influence. Saint Drogo’s is not simply underfunded; it is governed by a culture that treats money as both the cause of crisis and the solution to it.

Bael-Sharoth responds by seeking a seat on the school board rather than merely asking for compensation or an apology. Lisa is suspicious when he makes this request, because she expected him either to accept the school’s explanation or to walk away. His leverage is more sinister than ordinary financial investigation. He has examined the situation in a literal sense by digging near the relevant body, making it possible to summon a soul for questioning while holding its corresponding skull. The school-board dispute thus places bureaucratic misconduct beside supernatural intimidation, turning due diligence into a threat that cannot be answered by ordinary institutional procedure.

At the board meeting, Bael arrives before the remaining members and greets them with conspicuous confidence. Lisa and Ryan Thomas sit in the corner and avoid eye contact, while four middle-aged board members gather in a room where the deceased principal had previously served as the tiebreaker. Bael distributes folders containing a summary of the school’s finances, the destination of the missing money, and the people who still possess it. He explains that the late Ms. Kitch had concealed the full picture and that individually small schemes become damaging when viewed together.

The presentation is backed by a physical display of power. Bael taps a red leather notebook while looking directly at Mr. Gris, who turns pale because he knows what it contains; he repeats the gesture toward Mrs. Flores, who also reacts with fear. The notebook and the packets work together as instruments of disclosure and control. The documents make corruption legible, while the notebook implies that Bael possesses more intimate and dangerous evidence than the board can safely challenge. When Mr. Gris resists surrendering his packet, a quiet word from Bael stops him.

Rescue, Control, and Reconstruction

Bael-Sharoth tells the board that he intends to help save Saint Drogo’s, but the board members question his motive. He asks Ryan Thomas to arrange an introduction to a clergyman because Ryan is, for reasons even Ryan does not understand, someone the clergyman seems to like. Bael then places folders before every board member and declares that they have substantial work ahead. The school’s rescue is consequently organized as a campaign: financial records, church connections, board control, and pressure on individual members all become parts of the same operation.

The rescue produces tangible results. Bael-Sharoth persuades the school’s largest vendors to forgive its debts, and money begins flowing in from the church, causing the financial emergency to recede. He also adds members to the support staff through subcontractors whose services are donated by a company seeking a tax write-off. The arrangement continues the school’s established entanglement with corporate finance, but Bael redirects that mechanism toward rebuilding rather than merely extracting value.

The campus changes physically as well as financially. Gardens appear throughout the grounds, old buildings receive new coats of paint, and the cafeteria is completely overhauled. In the week before the doors open, the school becomes nearly unrecognizable. Bael speaks about the importance of nutrition while Ryan Thomas grows increasingly suspicious, sensing that the businessman is restoring the school with an intensity that exceeds any obvious benefit to his daughter, who will attend for only a few years at most.

Ryan compares every meeting with Bael to diving into shark-infested waters. Bael remains smiling, but the smile does not make him harmless; the other board members share the same unease. When Ryan asks what Bael is really doing and says the project feels like fixing up a house for sale, he identifies the central ambiguity of the reconstruction. Bael is preserving Saint Drogo’s, but he is also acquiring influence over it. The school’s improvement may be genuine, yet it never becomes innocent, because every garden, debt arrangement, staff appointment, and repaired building bears the mark of a powerful outsider’s intervention.

A New School and the Return of Ordinary Life

The school’s transformation reaches its most concentrated expression in the chapter titled “A New Coat of Paint.” The title emphasizes visible renovation, but it also suggests the limits of surface change: new paint can make an institution look renewed without proving that its old structures have disappeared. In Saint Drogo’s case, the reconstruction follows the exposure of embezzlement, falsified records, donor favoritism, and board misconduct, so the fresh appearance carries the pressure of everything that had to be concealed or forcibly corrected.

The school’s largest donors are not members of the board, and when news spreads that the previous teacher has died, recommendations and mild threats arrive from donors insisting that their sons or daughters are ideal candidates for the vacancy. This recurrence of influence shows that renovation has not erased the social system surrounding Saint Drogo’s. The school remains a contested symbol of privilege, and wealthy families continue to treat its positions as benefits to be claimed.

Bael’s intervention nevertheless leaves the institution financially stronger and physically renewed. The campus has gardens, repainted buildings, an overhauled cafeteria, forgiven vendor debts, church funding, and expanded support services. Yet the moment of apparent triumph is punctured by Bael’s private impatience with the students’ return. After praising the day as wonderful, he agrees that it is unfortunate that all the students will soon arrive to ruin it. The joke restores the school to ordinary family and academic life while also revealing Bael’s distance from the cheerful image of the devoted parent.

Saint Drogo’s School therefore ends this sequence neither as a pure sanctuary nor as a simple victim. It survives because corruption is exposed and money is redirected, but the same financial and coercive systems that once protected its insiders are used by Bael-Sharoth to secure entry, command the board, and rebuild the campus. Its decisive narrative function is to turn education into a meeting place for culture, class, institutional hypocrisy, and supernatural power: a school whose public respectability is continually tested by the methods required to preserve it.