The administration of Stuyvesant High School is talking to officials of the Princeton Review about paying the test-preparation company tens of thousands of dollars to write official college recommendations for rising seniors.

Although the city’s Department of Education already “outsources” many tasks – from organizing after-school programs to writing standardized tests to cleaning school bathrooms – some teachers, parents, and students at the prestigious high school, and the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said it’s a bad idea to farm out the “secondary school reports,” which accompany students’ college applications, to people who don’t belong to the school community.

“Somebody at DOE must have a very cozy relationship with Princeton Review for this kind of outsourcing to be condoned,” the teachers union president, Randi Weingarten, said. “This is really outrageous. What makes this a more absurd situation is that what we need generally in the school system is more guidance counselors, not the outsourcing of guidance work to a for-profit entity.”

“It just shows that she will try to politicize anything,” the press secretary for Chancellor Joel Klein, Jerry Russo, said of Ms. Weingarten.

Although the education department doesn’t seem to be behind the current developments at Stuyvesant, the department pays Princeton Review, a publicly traded company, to create citywide math tests, tutor poor children at failing schools, and conduct training sessions for teachers.

Two months ago, Stuyvesant administrators floated the names of two potential contractors that could help write the reports: a private college guidance counselor, Thea Volpe, and the national test-prep firm, the Princeton Review.

Contacted at her office, Ms. Volpe said she would not be writing any secondary-school reports for Stuyvesant students.

As of yesterday, the Princeton Review had not signed a contract with the school, but the company’s CEO, John Katzman, said his firm has been talking to school officials and would love to take the job.

“Stuyvesant is a blue-chip client,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’d love to help them.”

Mr. Katzman was reluctant to discuss his company’s negotiations with Stuyvesant, but sources said Ms. Volpe was offered $33,000 for the write-ups.

The CEO said Princeton Review professionals would interview each of the students for 15 to 20 minutes and review their records and their responses to questionnaires before writing up the secondary school reports.

He said his company would be ideally suited for the job – because of both its intimate knowledge of the college admissions process and its understanding of Stuyvesant.

“We work with hundreds of Stuyvesant students every year on test prep and other issues,” he said. “We know Stuyvesant as well as anybody outside of Stuyvesant.”

He said the job would entail “helping them with a very small part of the post-secondary counseling process,” and it would be more like giving the school “some extra arms” than taking over a core responsibility.

Mr. Katzman said his company already works with states and districts throughout the country to manage college counseling more effectively and take administrative work off the hands of overworked guidance counselors.

Despite Mr. Katzman’s reassurances, some members of the Stuyvesant community are not looking forward to turning over responsibility for some of the secondary-school reports to an outsider.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” a Stuyvesant English teacher, Charles Maurer, said. “The paid people really don’t have any relationship with the school, with the students. The whole rationale behind the letter is violated by this. The spirit is violated.”

For the past five years, Mr. Maurer has been one of six teachers at Stuyvesant responsible for getting to know college applicants and writing secondary-school reports. Until this year, Mr. Maurer said, he spent hundreds of hours a year reading up on, interviewing, and writing up about 130 students.

Mr. Maurer wasn’t paid more to write up the reports, but he had to teach only three classes, instead of the normal teaching load of five classes. He said, however, that he ended up spending much more time on the write-ups than he was given. In recent years, he said, he had resorted to writing about 40 of the reports over the summer.

This year, the school’s principal, Stanley Teitel, decided to cap at 90 the number of recommendations each of the secondary-school report writers would handle. That left about 250 students in the lurch – and led to the idea of outsourcing.

Mr. Teitel presented the idea to the School Leadership Team at a January meeting. That group of parents, teachers, and students did not vote on the idea, but there was a consensus that the school should find an in-house solution. Weeks later, though, when the secondary-school report writers received lists of their students, they were told Stuyvesant was farming out reports for about a third of the Class of 2006 to an outside company. In the week before the February break, juniors were told in homeroom that some of them would be working with outsiders.

“I think it’s a really bad idea,” a senior, Joshua Weinstein, said. “It sells out a core part of Stuyvesant.”

Mr. Weinstein, 18, applied early to Princeton University and got in. His secondary-school report was written by a Stuyvesant Spanish teacher, Milton Diaz. Although the 12th-grader had never taken Spanish with Mr. Diaz, they had worked together on a panel on academic honesty. That experience, Mr. Weinstein said, coupled with Mr. Diaz’s intimate understanding of Stuyvesant, helped make his recommendation more meaningful.

The student called outsourcing “sort of dishonest and morally unethical.” He said even if the secondary-school report writer assigned to a student doesn’t know the student well, the writer still knows everything about the high school.

“They know Stuyvesant, and they know what’s different about Stuyvesant and what makes it special,” he said. “It’s not about the technical aspects as much as it is that ‘x’ factor, that hidden bonus of being part of the Stuyvesant community.”

The co-president of Stuyvesant’s parent association, Lori Pandolfo, said she understands that the school needed to reduce the burden on the report writers. But, she said, if the school has to hire an outsider, it should be a temporary solution. She added that a lot of juniors are nervous because they don’t understand what is happening.

“If the students are not happy with it, that’s a problem, because, after all, you’re writing about them,” she said. “It’s their future that’s involved.”

Some teachers and students said they were worried that colleges might be skeptical of secondary-school reports written by someone from outside the high-school building.

A New York University spokesman, John Beckman, said the university doesn’t have a defined opinion about outsourcing the reports.

“We do rely on the secondary-school reports as an important part of the set of recommendations that accompany candidates for admission,” he said after a conversation with the university’s director of admissions. “In some ways, it is particularly important for all applicants from Stuyvesant – the group of candidates from Stuyvesant tends to be very strong, so we need meaningful recommendations to be able to understand the applicants fully.”

He continued: “Because recommendations have to be done with real knowledge of the individual students to be meaningful, the possible pros and possible cons of this reside in the details: how will the reports be put together by the outside firm, how much of it will be driven by teachers’ input, etc. It is possible to imagine outcomes that are fine and outcomes that are problematic.”

Mr. Teitel, the Stuyvesant principal, did not return multiple calls from The New York Sun requesting comment.

A spokeswoman for the education department, Michele McManus Higgins, said: “The notion of outsourcing has been on the table with the School Leadership Team, which includes parents, students, and faculty, but preference will be given to doing this in-house. A decision has not yet been made.”