Forum Index
»
Private & Independent Schools
Will Whittle be around next year?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
| Thank you I appreciate that. It just sickens me to see that people are wanting any type of educational facility to fail. Profit or nonprofit. Because when it comes down to it the money doesn’t affect the love that the teachers have for their students. And quite honestly just because Somethings called nonprofit doesn’t mean everybody that works there shopping and thrift stores lol |
Anonymous
I have nothing to do with Whittle, however there seems to be a weird thing going on in this thread where people are embellishing beyond what is clearly a negative outlook for the school. You would think that it would be good enough to report that a judge awarded judgement for a creditor advertising agency $300k at 18% interest. Instead it’s claiming there been a foreclosure filing which is not in evidence anywhere. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s certainly weird. |
Anonymous
I’m sorry! We were wondering what happened to you. I hope you are well. We miss you! |
Anonymous
Thank you I’m doing well. I definitely miss the school, the kids, parents and the staff though. It was such a great energy. As well as the other two guards. Maryann has since given birth to a beautiful daughter. And Unis is working at another site that she enjoys as well. Personally I started a spice company ( seazening.com ). I’ve been working pretty hard at that. I just hate that this whole thread seems like it’s taken on a mob mentality. And the focus has shifted… Not that it seems as though it ever was there. But it has no talk of a solution or true suggestions. And I think it’s shameful. Too often people are so removed when commenting on Internet threads. It’s almost as if they forget that this isn’t just a message thread these are real children, and real families. As someone who grew up in the districts private school network this place… Could be phenomenal. The philosophy, the vision is absolutely amazing. The openness, and the creativity in that environment is beautiful. To be able to watch kids from Connecticut Avenue, and Shaw “ before gentrification“ get along seamlessly is a beautiful thing. |
Anonymous
The difficulty with this as a solution is the $30-plus million that's owed. And the continuing high costs that a new owner or operator would face if they wanted to continue in the huge, beautiful space. There's a lot of risk involved in taking over a project that's in this amount of financial difficulty and that has a 30-year lease on a renovated-for-them property that's this high-end. Not a lot of school people could even cnotemplate taking on that risk and that burden. .... So if other schools and educators are unlikely to do it, who would step up to do it? Not clear. And as for the great program-- To get a great curriculum up, running smoothly, fleshed out with particulars, and established for the long haul, you need a faculty that hangs around for a while. So far, this school hasn't had that. The teachers and administrators they've hired have certainly been willing and able. But they lost almost the entire initial staff by the end of the second year. So all the burgeoning institutional memory that supports a strong school curriculum and practice went out the door. So this school year was in many ways a start from scratch. Keeping it going depends on holding the current faculty, who are now trying to get the program established. But since they've faced late paychecks -- and the threat of no paycheck -- a couple times this year, the chances that many will stay on to continue this project are probably fairly low. Again, that's a big risk for a new operator -- What if the current faculty and/or families don't trust that they'll be able to continue operationalizing Whittle's programs? That's another huge risk for a propsective new operator, I would think. |
Anonymous
|
The only way a new investor could come in is as part of a prepackaged bankruptcy. No one is ever going to pay all those contractors in full. But it’s hard to see how the school can continue even if all the debts were wiped out.
Some posters continue to express hope — even optimism — that an investor will poor money in and the future will be solved. It’s not going to happen. The school is running on fumes at the moment. You can love the vision, and you can call posters like me haters, but you’re only hurting yourself if you don’t recognize that the vision was not grounded in reality and that the end is near. |
Anonymous
| Stfu |
Anonymous
The last refuge of a poor soul with nothing left to even try to argue. |
Anonymous
| Let’s all remain optimistic for what is to come in the next few days however all I know is my child will not be returning back next year. The amount of unneeded stress on us parents and our children is evident. It’s very sad that we are focusing on the future years rather than what’s going on now. |
Anonymous
| Johnjoseph thank you for commenting. We miss you. My kids ask about you daily. I think we are using this space to vent. We can’t share our frustration with the teachers or leadership. They have enough on their hands. I don’t want the school to fail. I want them to succeed however I also don’t want to fail my kids. We got on a call this morning and it was another disappointment. We were being told that things were looking up with the investors but the lead investor pulled out. So here we are waiting on one other investor to give us the go ahead. Another 48 hours of nail biting to be had. On top of that the school needs 250 million dollars to move ahead. This is daunting and distressing. |
Anonymous
AGREED. We miss you a TON JohnJoseph! I love Whittle for my kids and the school would be awesome if it continued. But with the current finance situation it is going to take a diamond in the rough to pull us together. The school is banking on foreign money with new students but given the lead investors background(specifically country-not China rather another country)many of the new kid’s parents wouldn’t be the happiest to send their kids to whittle if the lead investor is going to be the main provider. |
Anonymous
Who is it this time, Russian oligarchs? The odds of it happening anyway are very slim. Hustlers like this always promise a new deadline just far enough away to leave uncertainty but not prompt people to abandon ship quite yet. It's a very old con. |
Anonymous
|
If the poster was correct that the school needs $250M to survive, it’s comical (except for those with kids in the school). As a ballpark, that’s around 4-5X the annual operating budget of most private schools, between 3-5X the endowment of the super elite privates and 5,000X tuition. If a for-profit school runs, let’s say, 20% margins, that would be approximately $10K in profit per student per year. That would require 25,000 student enrollment years assuming - and this is a big if - this magical profit wasn’t stolen by CW to line this pockets and entirely diverted to the investor (who would magically own 100% of the business).
I posted years ago that I thought this could only survive if the investors had a non-financial motivation (which, seemingly incorrectly, I speculated at the time was expansion of Chinese education in the US). It’s clear that even the Chinese oligarchs don’t trust Chris Whittle. |
Anonymous
|
I feel so bad for all of our parents. I just want to share that the staff feel the same way. We are exhausted by the continual unmet promises. Finding out the potential investor, who covered our pay numerous times, has pulled out is devastating. We were lead to believe that this investment was secure. The thing I know is that Whittle continues to hide the full details from us and blames everyone else for his failures. And he does this on a Sunday morning.
(johnjoseph we miss you so much) |
Anonymous
This thread is the chronicle of a fraud and a fraudster. Sorry it's upsetting to some, but the only way to stop people like Whittle preying on yet another set of victims is to make clear what he did this time and the consequences. |