Manhattan’s Private School Kids Are Back From Spring Break—and the Debriefs Have Started
Plus: How the wealthy are dealing with the crazy TSA lines, Montecito’s post office petition, Hunt Slonem’s Ritz takeover, another European art heist, and more...
If you came here expecting a graphic and a free letter, I’m going to keep you waiting a bit longer. Things are slightly out of order this week. That doesn’t mean I’m not delivering: spring break just wrapped for the private school kids (PSKs) of the Upper East Side, so it felt like time for RPS to check in. After all, we read Dionne Searcey’s quintessential New York Times piece last year, “Spring Break for the Teens of New York’s Elite: Sun, Fun and Networking.” Didn’t you?
If not, consider this your prompt. But because I’m nice, here’s a quick summary: For one week a year, a few hundred seniors from New York’s most expensive private schools effectively turn Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas into a kind of pre-college finishing school, just with far more drinking and far less supervision. They arrive in tight school clusters—Horace Mann, Dalton, Trinity—and spend the week cycling between the resort’s pools, the casino floor, and late-night hotel room parties, with wristbands that give them near-total access to the property. The fact that this is essentially a college-style spring break—but for high school seniors—is the part I couldn’t quite grasp. So I went straight to the horse’s mouth to hear how this year’s trip played out.
“In a city where a growing economic divide sometimes shows up most prominently in classrooms, this kind of extravagance is out of reach for most students. It is a closed-off world of wealth and connections many will never set foot in: Even before deciding on which college they will attend this fall, these teenagers, from some of the most elite and expensive high schools in the United States, mingle among the next generation’s upper crust.” - Dionne Searcey, New York Times, March 2025
Meet Rich People Shit’s anonymous Private School Kid—RPS’s PSK, or the PSK of RPS, whichever you prefer—who hadn’t even been home from the Bahamas for 24 hours before I had him on the phone walking me through the entire trip.
My favorite anthropological detail, though—and perhaps the most reminiscent of my own high school experience—was that a lot of the girls go on “P.I.ets” before the trip (“the Paradise Island diet”). You can dress up teenage disordered eating with a cute name, but some things don’t change.
Also in today’s letter: how the wealthy are dealing with the crazy lines of TSA, Montecito’s post office petition, another European art heist, Hunt Slonem’s Ritz takeover and Newport mansion, Rolex “Pepsi” mania, a $1 billion Saudi hotel push and more…
PSK is RPS’s anonymous Private School Kid correspondent, reporting from Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Paradise Island, Bahamas. This interview is a firsthand account and has been edited and condensed for length.
