Parents of students from a high-price, private New York City school are blasting school officials over an assigned homework project that asked students to pen first-person suicide notes.
According to The New York Post, outraged parents of York Prep students consider the assignment “inappropriate.” The paper reports, the English-class issued assignment involved students as young as 14 and required them to write personal goodbye letters.
The letters were to be written from the perspective of the May Boatwright character from the best-selling movie and film “The Secret Life of Bees,” the paper added. More specifically, it asked students to justify taking their own lives, just as the Boatwright character had done.
“We were pretty stunned at the scope of the assignment,” The Post reported the father of one ninth-grade student as saying. We thought this was such an outrageous assignment for a 14-year-old to get. We pay a lot of money to send our kids to the school.”
Rising tuition for high schoolers at the Manhattan based school is slated to top $41,000 at the start of the upcoming school year.
The Post reports the assignment was issued by new English teacher Jessica Barrish, who previously taught for three years in public schools.
“How would you justify ending your life? What reasons would you give?” The Post reported were some of the specific questions asked. Asked whether parents had complained to the school about the homework assignment, Headmaster Ronald Stewart told the paper “No, not a single one.”
York Prep also recently made headlines when then-headmaster Christopher Durnford was forced to leave the school for having an inappropriate relationship with a former 18-year-old student.
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