Aspen nursing students push to finish degrees
With program in limbo, cohort starts to organize
Theresa Losada is one of 400 Aspen University nursing students who expected to graduate this year.
In the days following the Arizona State Board of Nursing’s decision to potentially shut down the program, the students who pleaded with the board to allow them to graduate are now organizing.
“We’re not giving up, we’re not going anywhere, we’re going to fight it,” said Losada, a member of the December 2021 cohort at Aspen University.
Losada, who enrolled in December 2021, says the students hope to complete their degrees and sit for the National Council Licensure Examination, a national test all students must pass in order to become practicing registered nurses.
The Feb. 23 board decision means nearly 400 Arizona nursing students at Aspen University, some just eight weeks away from graduation, would not be able to complete their degrees or get credit for their courses at Aspen.
“Effectively, 400 students, on the verge of graduation, are left out in the cold. They have nothing to show for their three years of blood, sweat equity, financial strain and debt, and emotional exhaustion,” wrote the parents of an anonymous Aspen University student in a letter to Gov. Katie Hobbs.
The board room at 1740 W. Adams St. in Phoenix was packed on Feb. 23 with students wearing blue scrubs to show solidarity with their school as the Arizona State Board of Nursing held an emotionally charged meeting. It ended in a unanimous vote to put the school’s nursing program on a 10-day notice of potential shutdown. Board members cited curriculum instruction
issues and low exam scores.
Students have since started two petitions, spoken with state lobbyists, sent personal letters to the ASBN board members and reached out to Hobbs in an attempt to be able to finish their degrees and take the NCLEX exam.
Losada said the nursing students are using the skills they have been taught through the program to come up with organized ways to fight the 10-day shutdown notice.
“The 400 students have all elected leaders for each graduating class,” said Losada, who is one of the elected leaders. “We gather on Zoom meetings, and we are gathering data and facts and disseminating the information to our respective cohorts so that we are a united front.”
The petitions started by the students request that the university be allowed to continue through the end of the year. An email is sent to Gov. Hobbs every time the petition gets an electronic signature, according to Aspen student Louise DeBusk.
According to a Feb. 24 ASBN news release, the board has “expressed concerns regarding public safety and student safeness to practice on exit from the program.” Among the concerns were low annual NCLEX scores, inadequately proctored exams, and the use of student work hours as clinical hours, or the counting of clinical hours when students were not in facilities.
Donielle Jording, one of the elected student leaders, counters that she believes the program has equipped her to be a “competent and a safe practicing registered nurse.”
“I have learned incredible amounts of valuable information the last two years and I could have not done it without listening to my professors, preceptors, and understanding the material,” said Jording, who enrolled in June 2021.
Losada and other Aspen students pointed to Arizona’s nurse shortage as the biggest threat to the state’s public health, saying Aspen has the ability to remedy that.
“We are not a threat to public health. If anything, the (shortage of nurses) is a threat to public health,” Losada said.
Arizona, which ranks in the top 5 states experiencing the most severe nursing shortages, will disperse $43.1 million in funding from the Arizona Department of Health Services to five public and private universities across the state to fund accelerated nursing programs in hopes of mitigating the shortage.
Board meeting leaves students feeling unheard
DeBusk says students who attended the Feb. 23 board meeting did not feel like their voices were heard, nor did they feel the board was interested in hearing what they had to say, citing feelings of bias.
“We very much had the impression that the board’s decision was made up before we even walked in the door. That’s how we walked away from that meeting,” DeBusk said.
DeBusk started at Aspen in October 2021. She has been working toward her BSN on and off for 25 years. She said she was not able to afford to full-time nursing school as a stay-at-home mom and now attends Aspen on a full scholarship while working as a medical assistant.
“We agreed one class at a time, knock it out like that and then life kept getting in the way,” DeBusk said. “It’s only been recently that it’s been my turn to now focus on me.”
DeBusk, Jording and Losada said the students did not feel like the university was given a fair investigation, citing the metrics used by the board to evaluate the nursing curriculum as “outdated” because they referenced the NCLEX scores of cohorts who took the exam during the COVID-19 pandemic, a turbulent time for all nursing programs in the state, or who took it before Aspen made significant positive curriculum changes.
Some of these changes, according to DeBusk, were the implementation of NCLEX exam coaches, in-person simulation labs, increased frequencies of benchmark tests designed to help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and student access to an adjunct program called Kaplan, an online learning software with tests, simulations and quizzes.
“It’s not fair, they’re not looking at it completely. We are benefitting from almost our whole curriculum being new and improved,” DeBusk said. “They don’t seem to be looking at the positive, only the negative stuff.”
The board cited concerns the school was not providing experience in complex nursing care. However, Jording disagrees, citing experience at four different Valley medical centers, in tasks like labor and post-partum care and ICU and emergency room experience.
Losada said she has received experience through her nurse externship.
Students continue their studies as program’s fate hangs in limbo
DeBusk says it was roughly four months after she began her studies in Aspen’s accelerated hybrid nursing program when she first heard about the ASBN investigation.
“We wake up and hear all this stuff in the news about our school and we knew nothing about it,” DeBusk said.
The nursing program first went on probation with the ASBN in March 2022, due to low pass rates of the NCLEX exam.
The probation settlement avoided a formal hearing on alleged nursing program rule violations and held that the university would stop accepting new students until it improved its NCLEX scores to an 80% pass average for four consecutive quarters, but allowed current nursing student to continue their studies at the university.
In September 2022, Aspen University signed a voluntary surrender of its Phoenix nursing pre-licensure program approval with the ASBN because the school was struggling to raise NCLEX first-time pass rate requirement of 80% as agreed upon in the March settlement.
That surrender put the program into a “teach-out” to allow existing students scheduled to graduate in 2023 to complete their studies, while preventing the school from accepting new students and scheduling the program to end after the teach-out was complete.
“These 400 students left within the teach-out deserve to graduate and sit for the NCLEX,” Jording said. “We are resilient and just what the public needs to help this healthcare crisis.”
Losado said the students plan to see their studies through for as long as possible, citing a somber on-campus simulation the day after the board vote.
“We were told of the decision on Thursday, my class showed up on Friday,” Losado said. “Yes we were tearyeyed, yes we were devastated, but we showed up and so did all our professors.”