As Stone Academy audit proceeds, students looking for some answers
As state regulators move ahead with an audit of the Stone Academy nursing program, school attorneys and state agencies fight over details of the program’s closure and former students continue to demand answers.
According to records obtained by CT Insider, Stone Academy and various state agencies have traded increasingly contentious correspondence, presenting vastly different perspectives on the circumstances that led the school to close last month and the Office of the Attorney General to launch an investigation.
At issue are questions of whether Stone Academy needed to be shut down, how state agencies executed the closure, whether or not the school must pay for an audit into students’ transcripts and, most pressingly, what this means for hundreds of nursing students currently stuck in limbo.
State regulators allege that Stone Academy, a forprofit program with campuses in Waterbury, West Haven and East Hartford, failed to maintain proper attendance records, exceeded allowable studentto-staff ratios, hired unqualified instructors, held clinical instruction in nonclinical spaces and produced unacceptably low passage rates for students taking licensing exams.
As a result, the state asked that that the school pay $200,000 toward an audit that will determine which Stone Academy credits are and aren’t valid. On Monday, the Office of Higher Education officially
contracted with a national firm that will conduct the review over the coming months, paid for by the state, executive director Timothy Larson said.
“It’s important that we have an outside auditor look at all of these components so that we can address refunds appropriately, we can make sure that this permanent record transcript is reconciled to the extent we can do that,” Larson said.
In correspondence obtained by CT Insider, lawyers for Stone Academy dispute most of the state’s accusations, arguing that the school was not required to maintain attendance records, that its ratios were not above what was legally permitted and that its clinical instruction was in compliance with a pandemic-era executive order. They acknowledge the school had several instructors who did not meet licensing requirements but say that figure is lower than the state alleges.
As for passage rates, which dipped below 50 percent at some Stone Academy programs, attorneys for the school say the
concerning trend “reflects the unusual strains inflicted by the pandemic both on the institution but, more importantly, its student body” during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a letter sent from a Stone Academy representative to the Office of the Attorney General.
Moreover, Stone Academy attorneys say the state’s Office of Higher Education rushed the school’s closure, rejecting efforts to establish “teach-out” plans that would have let students finish their degrees. At one point, they alleged in a legal filing, officials from the Office of Higher Education, including Larson, personally seized transcripts and other documents from Stone Academy offices, behaving in a “haphazard and unprofessional manner.”
While Stone Academy attorneys have not fought the closure of the school, they have resisted the state’s requests that they pay for an audit.
“The Office of Higher Education’s actions are so bungled and chaotic they would be comical if not so devastating,” Stone Academy attorney Perry Rowthorn
said in a statement. “An unnecessary audit that will wrongly disenfranchise hundreds of students’ legitimately earned credits is the exact opposite of student protection. ... OHE would be well-advised to abandon it.”
In an interview Tuesday, Larson blamed Stone Academy for fighting against an audit that would have provided clarity on some of the state’s allegations. He denied acting inappropriately with regard to the document seizure, saying he and his staff followed proper protocols.
“They are purporting things that are just not accurate,” he said.
‘We were left in the dark’
As state regulators and Stone Academy lawyers spar, the situation has left hundreds of nursing students who attended the school in a sort of purgatory, unable to take licensing exams without degrees and unable to transfer their credits to other programs without accredited transcripts.
At a protest Tuesday outside the Office of Higher Education in Hartford, more than a dozen former Stone students chanted “Teach-out plan, now” while holding signs with
Larson’s face and the words “credit thief” and “Larson-y.” One former student wore a Stone Academy sweatshirt with “Stone” crossed out and replaced with “Scam.” An attorney representing some of the students, Cynthia Jennings, urged them to resist the audit and demand they be allowed to transfer their credits to other schools.
Symia Lyles, a single mother of three who was 10 months into a nursing program at Stone’s East Hartford campus when the school closed, said she was “completely frustrated” to have her plans derailed, especially amid a widespread nursing shortage.
“It’s crazy to me because our nurse community is suffering,” she said. “There’s a need for nurses, so I don’t understand why they wouldn’t be more caring on the situation.”