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Young teens at a pricey Upper West Side private school were asked to write first-person suicide notes — a macabre assignment that some of their parents have blasted as “inappropriate.”
The English-class homework at York Prep required students as young as 14 to write goodbye missives from the perspective of a character who offs herself in “The Secret Life of Bees,” a best-selling book and film.
The task included justifying why they had committed suicide, a grim process that rattled a few nerves.
“We were pretty stunned at the scope of the assignment,” said a father of a ninth-grade student at the school.
“We thought this was such an outrageous assignment for a 14-year-old to get,” he added. “We pay a lot of money to send our kids to the school.”
Tuition for high schoolers at the grade 6-to-12 institution on West 68th Street is slated to be $41,200 for the coming school year.
Newbie English teacher Jessica Barrish’s assignment last month (above) focused on having kids channel fictitious character May Boatwright by writing in first person — as if they were her — about her legacy and how they wanted to be remembered by her sisters.
“How would you justify ending your life? What reasons would you give?” the project asked.
Barrish, who previously taught for three years in the public schools, declined to comment.
Asked whether parents had complained to the school about the homework assignment, Headmaster Ronald Stewart said, “No, not a single one.”
Simon Critchley — a philosophy professor at The New School university in Greenwich Village who recently taught a suicide note-writing workshop for adults — said he believed the concerns, even for young teens, were overblown.
“I don’t see why this is inappropriate at all. If it is, then suicide is a taboo, and I simply think we have to think rationally about our taboos,” he said.
“I think it might even help students acquire a more mature and reflective approach to a hugely important topic.”
Barrish is not the first teacher to make waves by using suicide notes as a medium for creative writing.
In December, a French middle school teacher was suspended for asking his 13- and 14-year-old students to imagine that they were about to end their lives — and to write the reasons for it.
In England last June, the mom of a teenager who had been tasked with a similar writing project had the scare of her life after stumbling on the note and mistaking it for the real thing.
Her main beef was that the school should have given parents a heads up.
York Prep made headlines early in 2011 when then-headmaster Christopher Durnford — who happened to be Stewart’s son-in-law — was booted for having an inappropriate relationship with a former 18-year-old student.
Last month, The Post wrote about a $2 million lawsuit filed by Barrish against a college pal who tortured and killed her beloved cat — and allegedly trashed her Upper East Side pad.Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton