Is the 225-year-old Manhattan private school Friends Seminary getting ready to end its relationship with the Quakers? Very possibly! The NY Times today looks at the issues facing the relationship between the $32,870-a-year school and the city's few remaining Quakers and finds reasons for and against a split.

If the school and the meeting were to split it wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Many Friends schools over the years, including Brooklyn Friends and the Sidwell Friends school in DC where the Obama girls attend school, have extricated themselves from the same relationship.

Reasons for the split include the school's tuition which, at $32,870-a-year doesn't really match up with the "Quaker credos of simplicity, openness and equality," the school's "un-Friendly" and very picky admissions process, the fact that few of the students in the school are Quakers, the fact that right now if someone is injured in the school the Quakers are liable, not to mention that the school went so far as to recently name a building after a person when "the Quaker gospel of equality frowns on singling individuals out."

Reasons against the split include the fact that the two have been together for so long (the "if it ain't broke" line of thinking), the fact that the school is a tremendous means to getting the Quaker message out there, and the fact that the school is—fancy couches in the principal's office or no—still a Quaker school. Also, figuring out the rent the school would have to pay for the complex of buildings it uses by Stuyvesant Park would be a real headache.

In the meantime, Quakers being the kind of people who sit quietly when arguments get heated if the school and the meeting are to separate, it won't happen for awhile. And, as principal Robert Lauder said in a letter to the community today:

Whatever the eventual outcome, Friends Seminary will remain a school committed to its core Quaker values. Commitment to service learning, equality, simplicity, integrity, Meeting for Worship and economic diversity through financial aid—institutional priorities issuing directly from Quaker Testimonies—will continue to guide the School. A majority of our governing board will be members of the Religious Society of Friends. Further, we will continue to strive for excellence in the delivery of all programs so that, indeed, our students will be prepared to 'bring about the world that ought to be.'