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Will Whittle be around next year?
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Anonymous
Even Chris himself would laugh out loud at this. Bravo! Extremely well done and much needed relief |
Anonymous
| According to the WBJ article, the total amount sought by the various vendors is now over $35 million. Unlike the prior article in November where CW was quoted saying he expected to have a significant capital infusion from which all prior claims would be paid, he declined comment this time. |
Anonymous
That’s just the wily genius of an innovator and disruptor in action. I’m not surprised you linear thinkers can’t grasp 4-D chess. |
Anonymous
Paywall! Can someone summarize? |
Anonymous
Summarized two posts above |
Anonymous
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The list of companies and other groups that allege they haven't been paid for goods, services or construction work at the Whittle School & Studios' Northwest D.C. campus keeps growing. Now, it includes Children's National Hospital and a global engineering firm.
The latest five lawsuits and mechanic’s liens bring the total amount sought by Whittle's contractors to roughly $35 million, according to documents filed with the D.C. Recorder of Deeds and D.C. Superior Court. Chris Whittle, chairman and CEO of the Whittle School & Studios, has told the Washington Business Journal before that the coronavirus pandemic threw his fundraising into chaos and wrecked the company’s finances, which resulted in the delays of contractor payments and the cancellation of the Brooklyn campus. Whittle also has another campus in Suzhou, China under construction. He said in November that he's engaged in a series of bridge financings that he's hopeful will cover the cost of outstanding bills. “It’s actually a sizable recapitalization,” he told the Washington Business Journal in November. “[We] look forward to paying all those balances.” It is unclear if Whittle School & Studios has yet paid any of the previous court-ordered amounts. Whittle declined to comment on this story. The latest claim arrived last month. On Jan. 13, the American branch of London-based design and engineering giant Arup filed a notice of mechanic’s lien, through the D.C. Recorder of Deeds, against the Whittle School for $448,000. Arup provided engineering services for the D.C. campus at 4000 Connecticut Ave. NW dating back to January 2017 and extending until the filing date, according to the notice. Older cases, meanwhile, are just coming to light. In July, D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert Rigsby awarded Children’s National Hospital $243,707.78 in its lawsuit against the Whittle School, in which the D.C.-based pediatric hospital alleged the school hadn’t paid for services provided starting in August 2019, according to court documents. The complaint, which outlined the hospital’s contract with the Whittle School to provide nursing coverage, telehealth medical and specialty services, consultations, assessments and care for five years, was initially filed March 17. Spokespeople for Children’s National did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did the hospital’s attorney listed in court documents as Jennifer Routh of D.C. firm McDermott Will & Emergy LLP. Also last July, Mindshift Technologies Inc., a Sterling-based IT outsourcing and cloud services provider and subsidiary of Ricoh USA Inc., filed a small claims case against Whittle School & Studios in D.C. Superior Court, alleging the school owed it almost $7,680 for unpaid work, court records show. Mindshift Technologies said in its July 12 filing that it had entered a contract with the school in September 2019 for IT support and technological services, according to court documents. A hearing date isn’t set yet, according to the court docket. Mindshift Technologies didn’t respond to requests for comment, and neither did Shirien Badawi of Seledee Law Group LLC, the Baltimore-based attorney that the documents list as representing Mindshift. In June 2021, Singer Equipment, an Elverson, Pennsylvania-based company, sued Whittle School & Studios in D.C. Superior Court, claiming the school never paid for food service furniture and equipment totaling nearly $211,000, according to court documents. Singer Equipment claimed it entered a contract with the Whittle School in May 2019 for its D.C. campus, and, besides a $90,000 deposit, “Whittle has failed and refused to pay,” the company alleged in its complaint. A hearing is scheduled for March 25, and the case will be heard by Judge William Jackson, according to the court docket. Singer Equipment and attorneys listed in the complaint with Friedland Misler PLLC, a D.C. law firm, did not respond to requests for comment. In May, School Specialty Inc., an educational supplies company based in Greenville, Wisconsin, filed a small claims case against the Whittle School & Studios in the D.C. Superior Court, alleging the Whittle School owed it $6,898.29 for unpaid goods and interest, according to court documents. School Specialty said in its filing that it provided school supplies between October 2019 and January 2020, according to court documents. A hearing with Judge Jorge Vila is scheduled for March 1, according to the docket. School Specialty did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did Richard Kind, the Baltimore-based attorney at Law Offices of Kind & Dashoff, listed as representing the company in court records. |
Anonymous
Wasn't Whittle going to provide an update in 24 hours on the status of the bridge financing? Did Snow White and the Dwarves renege on their unwavering capital commitments? 
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Anonymous
| The trail of unpaid Whittle bills is utterly appalling. |
Anonymous
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This trail of unpaid bills and lawsuits is why Whittle's talks of large equity infusions and bridge loans is utterly fanciful. No one is going to throw good money after bad, $35 million of which will immediately be garnished to pay creditors. A prepackaged bankruptcy is the only viable option, but that doesn't serve Whittle (the man) since his equity will be wiped out in any such deal. And a prepackaged bankruptcy only works if the underlying business itself is viable, which this school is not. It is not like it is suffocating underly a large pile of debt that it cannot service and would be fine once the debt went away. It was started with an unrealistic cost structure relative to its revenue model and even if all prior liens were erased, would still be wildly unprofitable.
All Whittle is doing now is creating confusion and chaos, and hoping that someone will forget to do their diligence and hand him a large check. But even the most basic due diligence will uncover the large outstanding lawsuits and judgments at which point any right minded investor will walk |
Anonymous
| It's particularly egregious to see them stiff these smaller companies who likely operate on thinner margins. |
Anonymous
One wonders what moral code they're infusing in the young minds charged to their care.. |
Anonymous
In the big glossy book they put out pre-launch, the book that suckered in so many -- investors, teachers, families, newspaper reporters -- they claimed these things as their desired moral accomplishments: Whittle students, "through carefully carving their own character... will help goodness prevail." The school would provide an education that would "draw us together and support peace and prosperity." The school, they said, would "change for the better the lives of those students who attend and, beyond our own campuses, contribute to the cause of education on every continent." The school would aim to destroy what they call the current model of education, which "undermines the primary goal of education: the development of a child’s mental, emotional, social, and intellectual capacity." And they would a replace it with a much better method for "the molding of a an ethical person." The ethical people the school would mold, they said, would be "Emotionally Intelligent." How would they mold kids into these emotionally intelligent ethical persons? By caring "about the emotional development of our students—and we believe this cannot be left to chance. All our courses will be characterized by their commitment to exploring a range of values and principles governing the relationships between students, teachers, and all the 'citizens' of each school." By this means, Whittle School & Studios "strives to make social responsibility much more than its scholarship program." The school believes they'll attain these goals because of another of its core beliefs, they said: That 'the curriculum of a school is everything that transpiresthere—everything our students see, hear, and feel; every interaction with a peer or adult." And, they said, "while ambition in this era is often equated with ruthlessness and greed, we aim to graduate students with expansive goals for themselves and the world." This, they said, will be the moral story of their school: "All our students will have experienced considerable good fortune in their lives. They will have been born into a family that can afford to send them to an extraordinary private school or they will have won a Whittle School & Studios scholarship. Either way, fate will have smiled on our students. We hope to nurture their understanding of this and convert such awareness into ongoing humility. "Humility," they continued, "is a lifelong vaccine against the arrogance that sometimes accompanies privilege; equally important, humility is foundational to the desire to contribute, to return something to the world for all that it has brought one’s way. All of us are the lucky beneficiaries of our beautiful ecosystem, and part of being socially responsible is caretaking for future generations. We want every student to learn to be a steward of the world during hir or her time with us. And then the said this -- which did and does make me choke and make nauseated, given all that I've long heard about this man: "We believe Chris Whittle, the author of this book, provides the leadership and the inspiration needed for such an ambitious endeavor." He's certainly demonstrating that, isn't he? |
Anonymous
One observation: The moral distance between the families/teachers on the one hand, and Chris Whittle/cronies on the other, seems astronomical. The immorality of the latter clearly doesn't reflect the character of the former. But it'll severely impact its destiny. |
Anonymous
Wow. Thanks for sharing. The hypocrisy is stunning and beyond nauseating 🤢🤮 |
Anonymous
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Wait, Did you guys see the latest story???
https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2022/02/11/whittle-school-foreclose-building-intelsat.html Whittle School's D.C. home faces upcoming foreclosure auction The building goes up for auction on March 24 to settle a big debt, according to public documents. |