BANGOR, Maine — A Mainer and two of her classmates have sued a private New Hampshire college in federal court after failing a nursing course.
JoAnna Densmore of New Gloucester; Julia Shriver of Mansfield, Massachusetts; and Kristina Fuccillo of Smithfield, Rhode Island, filed the lawsuit in U.S. district courts in their respective states late last month. The defendant is Colby-Sawyer College, a private school in New London, New Hampshire, which has about 1,400 students and an annual budget of $70 million.
The suit appears in federal court because the three plaintiffs are from three different states. All three women were enrolled in the four-year bachelor’s nursing program at the college.
As part of that program, students typically complete a clinical course in their sophomore year. That course includes classroom time, lab work and a clinical internship at an area hospital one day a week. That clinical is graded on a pass-fail basis and is required in order to earn a degree in the program.
Participation in that nursing program is typically limited to 36 students, according to the complaint, but in 2014 the program was overbooked by 15 students. The school responded by giving the additional 15 students other options.
Most, including the complainants, chose to enroll in a special summer session of the course. That special session was meant to prevent students from having to put off their graduation, according to the school.
The students say they were assessed unfairly and didn’t receive appropriate reviews or evaluations from their instructor, preventing them from trying to improve their performance or coming up with remediation plans.
By the end of the summer session, 11 of the students enrolled in the summer course, including the three plaintiffs, had failed, changed their majors or left the nursing program, according to the complaint. The school offered to allow the students to try the course again in the spring 2015 semester.
The suit alleges the school had launched an organized strategy to “thin the herd” in the nursing program by failing as many students from that summer program as possible.
Colby-Sawyer plans to fight the suit, and denies any wrongdoing or discriminatory actions, the school’s counsel, Bradford Cook, said in an email.
“It is the College’s position that it bent over backwards to accommodate the nursing students by offering a summer session for the first time, and that was the equivalent of the course they would have had in the spring, fairly presented, supervised and graded,” Cooke wrote
The school is preparing a detailed legal filing to counter the accusations outlined in the suit.
The counts alleged in the complaint include deceptive trade practices, breach of contract, intentional misrepresentation and negligent misrepresentation.
The students are seeking several remedies, including monetary compensation for the tuition and room and board they paid during the summer course, attorney fees, and that the failing grade from the nursing course be scratched from their transcripts.
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