It appears that the parents at Sidwell Friends School, the elite D.C. Quaker school once home to both the Obama girls and Chelsea Clinton, have gotten quite intense when it comes to their kids’ college prospects.

In a January letter to parents, the head of Sidwell Friends, Bryan Garman, sent a letter to parents pleading with them all to—in so many words—calm the hell down. The Atlantic published the letter in full.

“Instances of disrespect are anomalous and often anonymous, but have nevertheless become increasingly intense and inappropriate,” the letter reads. “The circulation of rumors about students and/or the verbal assault of employees are antithetical to the School’s values and create a dispiriting work environment.”

The reader of such a letter can only take such a sentence to mean that parents at Sidwell Friends are suspected of starting mean rumors about their childrens’ peers, and that school staff has been subject to more than one “verbal assault” from an angry parent. In fact, these kinds of incidents may have caused the abrupt departure of two of Sidwell Friends’ college counselors last month, the Atlantic reports.

One of those counselors, Patrick Gallagher, had sent a letter to parents before Christmas to announce a set of new policies to be employed in the guidance counseling office. Garman’s letter reiterates those policies: The school does not permit parents or children to record conversations with college counselors; the college counseling office “will not consider anonymous and/or unsubstantiated claims made about student behavior;” counselors will no longer respond to phone calls from blocked phone numbers; and student records will only be released to the student or an approved family member.

One can only imagine the events that led to the creation of these policies.

“The new policies stem from a handful of unfortunate and uninformed interactions, some of which have been unkind to students, others that have disrespected our counselors,” Garman says in the letter.

Sidwell Friends is hardly the only elite prep school where parents behave badly with college admissions counselors. In fact, some parents make simple “verbal assault” and rumor-starting look like child’s play. More than 30 parents were hit with federal charges this year in the Varsity Blues scandal, accused of bribing college counselors, sports coaches, and admissions test proctors to cheat their childrens’ way into elite institutions.

D.C. universities have been implicated in the scandal—a Georgetown University tennis coach was charged with accepting bribes to help get 12 students get admitted as tennis recruits, despite not playing competitive tennis. The university announced last month that it was moving to expel two of the students who had been admitted to the university this way.