10-year-old boy with psychiatric problems is stranded in Children’s Hospital

The 10-year-old boy is trapped.

He spends his days locked in a psychiatric ward at Children’s National Medical Center in the District because he stabbed his cousin in the eye with a pencil and has said he wants to kill himself. He has been violent, depressed, and a danger to himself and others. Now, the hospital wants someone else to take care of him.
Lawyers for Children’s Hospital plan to go to court Thursday to ask a judge to have the boy’s mother or Prince George’s County come and get him. They argue in court papers that the child has been abandoned in the emergency psychiatric unit since he arrived Sept. 15 and that no one is willing or able to free him. His mother has refused to bring him home; Prince George’s Child Protective Services has not accommodated him; the boy’s father, recently reunited with him in the hospital, has no legal right to take him.

The hospital, in court papers, likens the fifth-grader to “a trespasser” who is taking up needed bed space.

His emergency treatment has long since run its course, and the boy — identified in court papers only as “L.F.” — now finds himself the subject of a maddening bureaucratic trap: He needs ongoing help but has nowhere to go.

L.F.’s predicament is extremely rare, pitting a hospital against a county government and the mother of a child in one of its beds. Children’s Hospital has even made the drastic suggestion to a D.C. Superior Court judge in court papers that he order the boy to be placed in an ambulance and dropped off at a Prince George’s County social services office.

Kenneth Rosenau, an attorney for the hospital who filed the court papers, declined to comment Wednesday, as did Milton McIver, the associate county attorney representing Prince George’s.

The boy’s mother agreed to meet with a Washington Post reporter Wednesday night but did not arrive for the appointment.

The Post generally does not name troubled juveniles without a guardian’s consent, and in this case it is not naming the boy’s parents because doing so would identify him.

Hospital officials wrote in court documents that the child has a history of behavioral problems and that staying in a ward with a heavy rotation — children generally spend no more than about a week there — has reinforced his sense that something is wrong with him. They argue that he was ready to leave nearly a month ago and needs to move out, both for his sake and for the hospital’s.

But the hospital can’t transfer him without a guardian’s approval.

Children’s Hospital “is not a hotel in which one can check in and stay so long as one pays,” its attorneys wrote.

Even though the boy is covered by insurance, the hospital has asked a judge to force Prince George’s to take custody of him, perhaps to place him in therapeutic foster care or a residential treatment center. The county has indicated to the hospital that it would like 60 to 90 more days to find a suitable facility, according to court papers.

Lavette Sims, a spokeswoman for the Prince George’s County Department of Social Services, said she could not comment on the case because it is pending. Typically, Sims said, her agency acts when a child is abandoned in Prince George’s. L.F. is in the District.

Lance Berkman says Albert Pujols better than Babe Ruth, partly because Ruth played in all-white time

ARLINGTON, Tex. - The only thing more difficult than getting Albert Pujols out Saturday night was getting the Cardinals slugger to talk about his historic night.

Pujols produced arguably the greatest single-game hitting  performance in World Series history, going 5-for-6 with three home runs, six RBI and 14 total bases in the Cardinals' 16-7 Game 3 win over the Rangers.

The three home runs matched a Fall Classic single-game record held by Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson, while the six RBI tied Bobby Richardson and Hideki Matsui for the most in a World Series game. Only Paul Molitor had recorded five hits in a game in the World Series, while the 14 total bases set a record. Once the game ended, however, Pujols tried to deflect any talk about his historic night.

"I don't concentrate on numbers," Pujols said. "This is not an individual game; this is a team effort. That's what I try to do every day, to go out there and help my ballclub to win however I can. Hopefully at the end of my career I can look back and say, wow, what a game it was in Game 3 in 2011, but as of right now, it's great to get this win.

"It was just a great team win. Everybody contributed."

Pujols might not have been impressed with his performance, but he may have been the only one.

"He's a better hitter than Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson and there's no doubt about it," said Lance Berkman, who is finishing his first season with Pujols in St. Louis. "I'm dead serious. Babe Ruth, as great as he was, played in an all-white league. Now we have the best talent pool we've ever had and he's doing it in that environment. He's the greatest."

Chris Carpenter, Pujols' teammate since 2003, didn't seem surprised by Pujols' explosion.

"I've been very fortunate to watch this guy go out there and compete for the last nine years," Cardinals starter Chris Carpenter said. "It's unfortunately for him at times, because that's what he's expected to do. Last night was truly an Albert Pujols night that I've seen multiple times, no matter if it's April, June. Fortunately for us it was Game 3 of the World Series, but he's done this many times."

Pujols' three-homer night was the fourth in World Series history and the eighth overall in a postseason contest, the second this season. Adrian Beltre homered three times against the Rays in Game 4 of the ALDS, which was the first three-homer game in the playoffs since 2002.

The stat line wasn't only historic from a World Series standpoint. Pujols became the 12th player to collect five hits, three home runs, six RBI and four runs scored in a single game, something that hadn't been done since 2003 and has been achieved only four times overall in the past 35 years.

"It's obvious he's one of the best baseball players in the game," Rangers manager Ron Washington said. "We've just got to execute better."

It would be difficult to blame the Rangers for pitching around Pujols for the rest of the series, though with Matt Holliday, Berkman and David Freese hitting behind the first baseman, the Cardinals aren't worried about that scenario.

"Whatever they choose to do, you respect the fact that they think they know what's best for their club," Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said. "If the idea is for Albert not to beat them, that doesn't bother us, because the depth that we have in front and behind him."

Pujols was hitless in the first two games of the Series, going 0-for-6 with a walk and a hit-by-pitch. After his Game 3 breakout, he entered Sunday night's game with a .416 average (.5-for-12) in the Series, bringing his career average in 12 World Series games to .309. "I felt that I swung the bat pretty good the last couple of games; that's the way baseball goes," Pujols said of his first two games in the series. "It is what it is, and you just have to make sure you don't get frustrated and just make sure that you bounce back the next day, that whatever it takes our ballclub to win."

Exotic animals escape Ohio farm; owner found dead

ZANESVILLE, Ohio (AP) – Dozens of animals escaped Tuesday from a wild-animal preserve that houses bears, big cats and other beasts, and the owner later was found dead there, said police, who shot several of the animals and urged nearby residents to stay indoors.
The fences had been left unsecured at the Muskingum County Animal Farm in Zanesville, in east-central Ohio, and the animals' cages were open, police said. They wouldn't say what animals escaped but said the preserve had lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes, camels and bears. They said bears and wolves were among 25 escaped animals that had been shot and killed and there were multiple sightings of exotic animals along a nearby highway.

"These are wild animals that you would see on TV in Africa," Sheriff Matt Lutz warned at a press conference.

Neighbor Danielle White, whose father's property abuts the animal preserve, said she didn't see loose animals this time but did in 2006, when a lion escaped.

"It's always been a fear of mine knowing (the preserve's owner) had all those animals," she said. "I have kids. I've heard a male lion roar all night."

Lutz called the escaped animals "mature, very big, aggressive" but said a caretaker told authorities the preserve's 48 animals had been fed on Monday. He said police were patrolling the 40-acre farm and the surrounding areas in cars, not on foot, and were concerned about big cats and bears hiding in the dark and in trees.

"This is a bad situation," Lutz said. "It's been a situation for a long time."

Lutz said his office started getting phone calls at about 5:30 p.m. that wild animals were loose just west of Zanesville on a road that runs under Interstate 70.

He said four deputies with assault rifles in a pickup truck went to the animal farm, where they found the owner, Terry Thompson, dead and all the animal cage doors open. He wouldn't say how Thompson died but said several aggressive animals were near his body when deputies arrived and had to be shot.

Thompson, who lived on the property, had orangutans and chimps in his home, but those were still in their cages, Lutz said.

The deputies, who saw many other animals standing outside their cages and others that had escaped past the fencing surrounding the property, began shooting them on sight. They said there had been no reports of injuries among the public.

Staffers from the Columbus Zoo went to the scene, hoping to tranquilize and capture the animals. The sheriff said caretakers might put food in the animals' open cages to try to lure them back.

Lutz said people should stay indoors and he might ask for local schools to close Wednesday. At least four school districts in the area canceled classes.

Lutz said his main concern was protecting the public in the rural area, where homes sit on large lots of sometimes 10 acres.

"Any kind of cat species or bear species is what we are concerned about," Lutz said. "We don't know how much of a head start these animals have on us."

A spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which usually handles native wildlife, such as deer, said state Division of Wildlife officers were helping the sheriff's office cope with the exotic animals in Zanesville, a city of about 25,000 residents.

"This is, I would say, unique," spokeswoman Laura Jones said.

White, the preserve's neighbor, said Thompson had been in legal trouble, and police said he had gotten out of jail recently.

At a nearby Moose Lodge, Bill Weiser remembered Thompson as an interesting character who flew planes, raced boats and owned a custom motorcycle shop that also sold guns.

"He was pretty unique," Weiser said. "He had a different slant on things. I never knew him to hurt anybody, and he took good care of the animals."

Ohio has some of the nation's weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them.

In the summer of 2010, an animal caretaker was killed by a bear at a property in Cleveland. The caretaker had opened the bear's cage at exotic-animal keeper Sam Mazzola's property for a routine feeding.

Though animal-welfare activists had wanted Mazzola charged with reckless homicide, the caretaker's death was ruled a workplace accident. The bear was later destroyed.

This summer, Mazzola was found dead on a water bed, wearing a mask and with his arms and legs restrained, at his home in Columbia Township, about 15 miles southwest of Cleveland.

It was unclear how many animals remained on the property when he died, but he had said in a bankruptcy filing in May 2010 that he owned four tigers, a lion, eight bears and 12 wolves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had revoked his license to exhibit animals after animal-welfare activists campaigned for him to stop letting people wrestle with another one of his bears.

Mazzola had permits for nine bears for 2010, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said. The state requires permits for bears but doesn't regulate the ownership of nonnative animals, such as lions and tigers.

Executives Exit at Wal-Mart In China

BEIJING—Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said the CEO of its China operations and its senior vice president for human resources there have left the company, which is facing unprecedented regulatory challenges in a key growth market.

Ed Chan, who served as president and chief executive of Wal-Mart China since 2006, left the company Monday for personal reasons, a company statement said.

Clara Wong, senior vice president Wal-Mart China's human resources division, has also stepped down.
Scott Price, president and chief executive of Wal-Mart Asia, has been appointed to serve as interim leader of Wal-Mart China. Mr. Price will maintain his role as president and chief executive of the Asia division, Wal-Mart spokesman Anthony Rose said, declining to comment further.

The leadership shake-ups are the latest management shifts within Wal-Mart's China operations. In May, its chief financial officer and chief operating officer for China resigned.

Last week, the Bentonville, Ark., company said two Wal-Mart employees were arrested and 35 others were detained in the Chinese metropolis of Chongqing over local-government allegations the retailer fraudulently labeled ordinary pork as a more expensive organic type.

On Wednesday, a Chongqing government spokesman cited a report in the city's official newspaper that said of the 35 held, 25 were still being detained, meaning authorities would have to release or charge them in coming days. Seven other people were under house detention and three had been released on bail.
Wal-Mart has said it is cooperating with continuing investigations. It temporarily closed 13 of its stores in Chongqing after the government ordered they be closed for 15 days and fined Wal-Mart 3.65 million yuan (about $575,000). Chongqing authorities alleged the company sold mislabeled pork for nearly two years.

Wal-Mart said in March it had $7.5 billion in revenue last year from the 328 China stores then operating, a number that has since grown to nearly 350.

Kim Zolciak, Kroy Biermann engaged: 'Real Housewives of Atlanta' star set to wed NFL player

Kim Zolciak is set to become a real housewife.

The "Real Housewives of Atlanta" star is engaged to Atlanta Falcons player Kroy Biermann, Life & Style reports.

The busty blond, 33, took to Twitter on Tuesday to confirm the news, writing, "I am happy announce that YES [Kroy Biermann] and I are engaged! I'm on a cloud and so blessed!!"

"I have never been happier," she continued. "[Kroy] has made me smile from day 1!"

Zolciak, 33, and Biermann, 26, have been together for nearly 18 months and welcomed their first son, Kroy Jagger, on May 31.

Though Zolciak had no immediate plans to walk down the aisle after learning she was expecting, she admitted to foreseeing her future with Biermann.

"I definitely don't want to get married while I'm pregnant," she told the mag last year. "But I can see myself marrying Kroy in the future."

Once married, Biermann will become stepdad to Zolciak's two daughters, Brielle and Ariana, from a previous marriage.

A Long and Distant War: Photos from Afghanistan, 1988-2009

Afghanistan is a hard place to enter and even harder to leave. Everything in Afghanistan, the geography, the weather, the tribesmen, all conspire to keep out unwanted visitors. And once you’re inside this labyrinth of stone, it’s nearly impossible to find your way out. Dust storms besiege Kabul’s airport, blizzards close the mountain passes and bandits or Taliban fighters (it’s hard to tell them apart) ambush the roads.

Ask the British how hard it is to leave Afghanistan. During their infamous retreat from Kabul in 1842, only one survivor out of 17,500 soldiers and camp followers staggered out of the Kabul Gorge alive. Ask the Soviets, who fared nearly as badly. And if history is any judge, the Americans won’t face an easy departure, either.

Photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg has also found it impossible to leave. Since he first trekked into Afghanistan with the mujahedin in 1988, Nickelsberg keeps going back. He does so out of curiosity, duty and obsession. He was there for the Soviets’ withdrawal—flowers for tank gunners until the Red Army rumbled into the hairpins of the Hindu Kush and fell prey to ambush. He was there for the vicious civil war that broke out when the Soviet-backed regime fell apart in 1992 and Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks turned snarling on each other. (And may do so again, after NATO forces depart.)

Nickelsberg was there for the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan, their swift fall after the U.S.-led invasion and the Taliban’s rise again. “The Americans didn’t grasp how complex this is,” Nickelsberg says, “The soldiers come and go so fast they barely have time to figure out where the sun rises and sets.”

His photos bear witness to that complexity, to the savage beauty of Afghanistan and its people. His photos are spare, intense. Every image is stripped down to the essential drama, and in doing so Nickelsberg illuminates the pivotal moments in Afghanistan’s chronology of  war and the brief, quiet moments in between, when Afghans catch their breath.

When I first ventured into Afghanistan in 1990, I sought out Nickelsberg, thinking, unwisely, that he would keep me from getting shot at. It was quite the reverse. Nickelsberg reacts to gunfire like a bird dog to the rustle of quail. He led me straight into the Kabul Gorge, where in my imagination, ghosts from the British massacre flitted in the ravine’s bottomless shadows and menace was ever-present. Nickelsberg was looking for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of Afghanistan’s more sadistic, and enduring, warlords. Luckily, we didn’t find Hekmatyar’s cutthroats that day, though a year later they would murder my Afghan translator. Following Nickelsberg into dangerous situations, mortar barrages, gun-battles, sieges and ambushes, became a pattern for the next 16 years of my life while I covered Afghanistan. He would get us into jams but he would always know how to get us out. Nickelsberg has longer legs than I do but, in retreat, I always out-ran him.

Many journalists love to dress up like Afghans, with the long tunic, the baggy pantaloons and the flat woolen caps known as pakools. They’re like giddy children going off to a costume party. Not Nickelsberg. He dresses for war as if going for a brisk walk in the Vermont hills, his hair as clipped as a military officer’s, perfectly parted. In the midst of Afghanistan’s chaos, Nickelsberg always kept his composure, his flinty style. And this reflects in his photography: there is a sharpness to his composition, a rigorous clarity.

Most photographers are captivated by swift light, motion and color, which Afghanistan has aplenty. But Nickelsberg stuck around. He bothered to learn about the people he portrays so keenly, the reasons why they laugh and cry—and kill. His photos aren’t just war and gore—though, undeniably, that’s part of Afghan history—but also the quotidian. Two shots in particular, young men dancing at a picnic in Babur’s gardens and warrior Ahmed Shah Masood sitting with his companions, have the delicacy of Mogul miniatures.

Nicklesberg’s hard-won knowledge of Afghanistan gives a rare depth to his photos. He wasn’t just snapping a pretty picture. He knew he was capturing Afghanistan’s history, and ours.

Robert Nickelsberg was a TIME magazine contract photographer for 25 years and was based in New Delhi from 1988 to 2000.  During that time, he documented conflicts in Kashmir, Iraq, Sri Lanka, India and Afghanistan. Currently represented by Getty Images, he is working on publishing a book of his photographs from Afghanistan.

Tim McGirk, a former TIME bureau chief, has been covering Afghanistan on and off since 1990, when he first ventured in with photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg. McGirk is currently managing editor of the University of California at Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.

Irabu Got Lost on the Road Back

It was the kind of inquiry that curious pitchers make, even ones with World Series rings. How, Hideki Irabu wanted to know, do you throw a changeup?
Jerry Spradlin, his pitching coach on the Long Beach Armada in the spring of 2009, was all too happy to show him. A former journeyman major league reliever, he was a newcomer to coaching and was eager to share some of what he knew, even something as basic as a changeup with a pitcher once called the Nolan Ryan of Japan.

The lesson was impromptu and informal, typical of the way things were done on the Armada, an independent league team that served as a halfway house for older players making last-ditch comebacks and younger players still hoping to make it as professionals. With the help of an interpreter, Spradlin showed the grip to Irabu, who threw about 10 warm-up pitches in the bullpen before his start that day.

Even though he was 40 and a former Yankee, Irabu was an attentive student. He was also a quick study. He struck out the side in order during the first inning using his new pitch to put away the batters.

“He clearly had something left in the tank,” Spradlin said with a chuckle.

As per tradition at Armada games, the fans passed the hat to reward players for their feats. Irabu had made millions during his career and did not need the $300 that reached the dugout. Some players wanted to give it back to the fans while others thought they should split it among themselves.

Garry Templeton, the team’s manager, felt otherwise. He told Irabu where the money had come from, and without hesitation, Irabu told him it should be spent on food and beer for the team. The clubhouse attendant was dispatched to a store for provisions.

“We had a party on him,” Templeton said.

Two years later, Irabu, 42, was found hanging in his house in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., an upscale Los Angeles suburb. At some level, all suicides are mysteries. Irabu apparently left no note, but he had his troubles. He was known to drink heavily at times. His wife and two children had moved out weeks before. His two noodle restaurants had closed, and he was casting about for something else to do.

“When I saw him last summer, he told me he was having a midlife crisis,” said George Rose, who befriended Irabu when he worked for two years as his interpreter on the Yankees. Rose then repeated what had been a kind of conventional wisdom about the Irabu: he had a big heart, but could be his own worst enemy.

Irabu, for sure, had seemed to battle demons throughout his meteoric rise and fall. A No. 1 draft pick in Japan, he was best known for his record-setting fastball, and his temper off the field. Even during his best years in the mid-1990s, he had a love-hate relationship with the news media, which needled him by writing about his mixed heritage, a taboo in Japan. He called some Japanese reporters locusts. He was eager to play in the United States, but he bucked the baseball establishment by refusing to be traded to the San Diego Padres, despite their generous contract offer.

Instead, he held out until the Yankees could sign him, and he received a hero’s welcome in New York. He twice was named the American League pitcher of the month, but he faded late in seasons. His moodiness, injuries and weight problems led George Steinbrenner to call him a fat toad, a stinging tag that he could not shake.

He returned to Japan in 2003 and helped the Hanshin Tigers win the Central League pennant for the first time in nearly two decades, a redemption of sorts. But the next year, the injuries piled up and he retired after pitching in three games.

His time with the Armada in 2009, then, turned out to be Irabu’s last attempt to recapture his love of the game and to fulfill some of his unmet expectations.

But like many things Irabu did, his time on the Armada came with conditions. He was with the team only on days when he pitched, and he went to those games with a personal assistant and an interpreter. Because of his limited English, his teammates had little sense of Irabu as a person.

Some of the players, chiefly those who had never had a whiff of the major leagues, were in awe of Irabu nonetheless. But they could also be irked that Irabu kept his distance.

“To get to know him as a teammate or friend was nearly impossible,” said Scott Lonergan, a starting pitcher that year who now works as a scout with the Padres. “He didn’t come off as a prima donna. There was no sense that he was better than anyone. It was a strict business transaction. He would show up, pitch and leave.”

The New School

Even while walking through a construction site, with saws grinding and jackhammers pounding, Chris Whittle, in his khakis and button-down shirt and bow tie, looks like a professor—a classics scholar at a small liberal arts college, perhaps. But as Whittle describes the transformation of this 215,000-square-foot building on 10th Avenue in Manhattan, he sounds more like a salesman. The former warehouse is now barren, stripped to bare walls and concrete floors. The floors are slightly sloped because, according to Whittle, the building was once a turkey slaughterhouse, and the slanted floors allowed turkey blood to drain into gutters. “But we’re not going to level them,” Whittle says. “We want to preserve the history!”
Starting in September 2012, this 10-story building will house Whittle’s newest big idea, a school for 1,600 children of the New York financial elite that Whittle has dubbed Avenues: The World School. Whittle wants Avenues to do two things: prepare students for a globalized world, and turn a hefty profit. The school will likely be the final venture in Whittle’s ambitious, lucrative, controversial and curious career, and the 64-year-old entrepreneur has a lot riding on it: an investment of $75 million from private equity firms, yes, but probably more important for Whittle, the possibility of a triumphant, redemptive final act.


If Whittle is feeling any heat, he shows no sign of it. He does admit to being busy—developing the curriculum, hiring faculty “right and left” and meeting with “hundreds and hundreds” of prospective parents. Unused to the idea of a for profit school, they’re cautious about sending their kids to an experiment, so Whittle needs to walk them through it. Right now, Whittle says, “Fifty percent of my time is with the parents.”

If Chris Whittle’s vision is realized, Avenues will be a striking new facility looking out over Manhattan’s High Line, the city’s newest, trendiest park. It will offer innovative classrooms— no tedious tic-tac-toes of chairs here, just small clusters of seats or seminar tables. It will have a great library, advanced computer facilities, expansive art and music studios, and 20,000 square feet of athletic space. In short, in the next 12 months Avenues will go from being nonexistent to being one of the best-equipped schools in the country. In theory, anyway.


Inside this state-of-the-art building, Avenues will preach a future-minded philosophy intended to prepare children for a world of diminishing borders. Starting in nursery school, Avenues students will be immersed in either Mandarin or Spanish. In the world of the near future, Whittle says, “an English-only child is not going to be able to compete.”


Students will also be required to take a “world course,” a study of international cultures and issues. And in time, the New York school will be the flagship of 20 or more Avenues schools located in “mega-cities” around the world—Mumbai, Beijing, São Paulo, London, Paris, Hong Kong, etc. Whittle plans to start opening two of those locations a year starting in 2014. If you’re a student at one Avenues school, you’ll be able to study at any of them.


New York City already has elite private schools, thank you very much: Dalton, Brearley, Collegiate, St. Bernard’s, Chapin and so on. Most of them are on the Upper East Side, they cost around $40,000 a year, and they generally offer a rigorous education, top-rate facilities and high acceptance rates at the finest colleges in the land. But there are not very many of these elite schools, and even for those unfazed by price, the competition for a cherished spot in one is brutal, an academic and social gauntlet that scars both children and parents.

There’s an opportunity here, no question. Avenues could appeal to parents who want the excellence those schools offer but dislike their social elitism; parents whose kids didn’t get into those schools; parents who moved to New York from another country and don’t know the social landscape well enough to play the private school game. Avenues could certainly appeal to downtown parents who don’t want to send their kids to the sniffy confines of the far-off Upper East Side.


But can Whittle deliver what he promises? Starting a school for 1,600 is a mammoth undertaking, and Whittle’s career is filled with grand visions that haven’t quite panned out.


He was born in 1947 in Etowah, Tenn., where his father was the local doctor. Even as a boy, he was an entrepreneur. Not an athlete, Whittle used to keep the stats for the local sports teams, then go home, write up the games for the Chattanooga Times and Knoxville Sentinel and call in the copy. The next morning, he’d deliver the newspapers. “I was the first vertically integrated kid,” Whittle jokes.


Whittle went to the University of Tennessee, where he and fellow student Phillip Moffitt started a campus guide called Knoxville in a Nutshell, which became a lot of campus guides, and then a company, 13-30, named for the demographic it sought to reach. In 1979, when Whittle was 31, 13-30 acquired Esquire for a reported $3.5 million; Whittle and Moffitt revitalized the moribund men’s mag and in 1986 Whittle bought out Moffitt and sold it to Hearst for $80 million. The two went their separate ways and 13-30 became Whittle Communications, a publisher of, among other things, controlled circulation magazines, called Special Reports, for doctor’s offices—content for a captive audience.


In 1989 Whittle launched Channel One, a company that donated televisions and VCRs to school classrooms on the condition that the schools show Channel One’s 12-minute daily broadcasts— and accompanying advertising.


Passionately denounced for bringing television and ads into America’s classrooms, Whittle was making schools an offer many couldn’t refuse: free technology in exchange for a mere 12 minutes. In 1994, he sold the company to buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts for a reported $250 million. It has since struggled.


Whittle now embarked on his most ambitious venture yet: After convincing Yale president Benno Schmidt to join him, Whittle launched Edison Schools, a for-profit company that aimed to start and/or manage 1,000 public schools. Hailed by advocates of school privatization, Edison Schools was a mixed success—very mixed. Hampered by opposition from many parents and teachers, Edison never came close to hitting that 1,000-school mark, and the quality of many of its schools was unimpressive. “We were not quite as consistent as we should have been,” Schmidt concedes now.


But in a deal whose bottom line was hard to figure, the Florida state pension fund bought the company for an estimated $180 million in 2003. It has since morphed into a semi-successful educational services company called EdisonLearning.


At 60, Chris Whittle was a wealthy man, but not a universally respected one. “I said to myself, ‘All right, I’m not going to be CEO of Edison,’” Whittle recalls. “And I thought, ‘I have one last company in me,’ and started thinking about what that was.” The answer was easy. “I just said, ‘Schools. That’s what I do.’”


Whittle convinced Schmidt, who is now 69, and Alan Greenberg, 60, a colleague from Esquire, to join him. The three have hired the previously retired principals of Exeter and Hotchkiss boarding schools—both in their 60s— to be the co-heads of Avenues. Other crucial positions have been filled by alumni of top jobs—all white men and women—at prestigious schools in Manhattan and elsewhere. Avenues may be the global school of the future, but the people working for it look a lot like the past.


If Avenues is to succeed—both on its own and, as Whittle hopes, as a revenue stream with which to repay investors and fund the development of Avenues overseas—it will have to turn a substantial profit. How will one school do that? I put that question to Alan Greenberg, who spoke about what it really costs to educate a child. The best public school systems, he said, spend maybe $20,000 per kid. But their students get test scores comparable to students in New York’s top private schools. Avenues, he implied, could educate a kid for $20,000 while charging twice that.


Where will the cost savings come from? Greenberg gave one example. “There are schools in town that teach 15 languages,” he said. “We teach two. Huge efficiency. You don’t have a classroom with three kids taking Russian.” That, he added, was a small point. “It’s decision after decision after decision like that.”


Some parents may be put off by such calculations, but such is the demand for good schools in New York that many may happily live with them. After running full-page ads in the Times and The Wall Street Journal, and hosting events for parents at chi-chi locales such as the Crosby Street Hotel, the Soho House and the Standard—watering holes better known for the destruction of brain cells than their development—Whittle says that Avenues has received over 1,200 applications for the fall of 2012.


For Whittle, it’s another chance to show that he’s not just in it for the money. “I’m not about public schools or private schools,” he says. “I’m about better schools.”