Frustrated, a Florida nursing student wrote to the state’s attorney general, explaining how they’d paid $16,500 to their school and completed their program months earlier but still did not have a diploma or transcript and so could not work as a registered nurse.
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There were other problems at Carleen Health Institute, too, the student said in a December 2021 letter.
“The curriculum is poor, most of the students are from overseas, YouTube videos are used as teaching aids, there is no school registrar, and cell phone is the effective means of communicating with the so-called staff,” the person wrote.
The complaint was one of more than 40 lodged by current and former Carleen students over a five-year period. Several told Florida officials they worried the school was committing fraud.
“Something must be very fishy” at Carleen, one wrote in 2020, given that its program for registered nurses lasted just six months, with no prerequisites for admissions, and most other nursing schools have both admissions requirements and coursework that takes 18 months or two years to complete.
“Please investigate about this school,” the student wrote. “They are messing up the system and this is not RIGHT.”
The school — which at one point operated campuses in Brevard, Broward and Palm Beach counties — was investigated, eventually, by the FBI as part of the agency’s Operation Nightingale, a take down of a diploma mill operations involving more than a dozen Florida nursing schools. Both a Carleen administrator and its founder were charged, in 2023 and 2025, respectively, in the scheme to sell thousands of fake diplomas and later pleaded guilty.
Carleen closed as a result, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
But as far back as 2018, when federal prosecutors say the once-legitimate Carleen began fraudulent operations, students were alerting state officials to serious problems with the school, and Florida took no action to shut it down.
A 2009 Florida law loosened nursing school regulations, opening the door for new, for-profit and unaccredited nursing schools to set up shop in Florida and making it far harder for the state to shutter the troubled ones. Carleen is a key example of that law’s problems, which some lawmakers have tried, unsuccessfully, to overhaul in recent years.
The students and former students wrote to state officials about Carleen from 2018 to 2023 filled out complaint forms and even emailed Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to documents the Orlando Sentinel recently received through a public records request from the Florida Department of Education. The department blacked out the names and contact information of the students.
They reported the school offered subpar and expensive courses and failed to provide basic services, including sending transcripts.
One student sought “swift intervention” from the education department in June 2021, writing that they had enrolled the previous year in what was advertised as a six-month program for aspiring registered nurses. After starting, the student said, Carleen leaders announced the program would actually take nine months to complete.
The student completed that extended coursework and four months later had yet to receive a transcript. School officials “constantly ignore my calls, “ the student wrote. “No doubt, there is a fundamental breach of my right as a student at Carleen Health Institute by the school administrators.”
The Florida Department of Education did not respond to emailed questions from the Sentinel about the complaints, including whether it took any action against Carleen in response to the students’ concerns.
But the education department oversees the Commission for Independent Education, which licenses unaccredited, private schools like Carleen. And a commission employee testified in June at the trial of Carleen Noreus, the school’s founder and namesake who faced several felony charges for her role in issuing fake diplomas.
On the stand, Jason Bowman, an educational policy analyst, was asked about the students’ complaints and said there was little the commission could do, though it had licensed Carleen to operate in the state.
“Our authority with respect to student complaints is rather limited,” he said. “We reach out to the school, ask the school to provide an explanation, and essentially we are mediators attempting to help resolve the complaint.”
Noreus pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. She is set to be sentenced later this month and faces up to 40 years in prison. Her attorney declined to comment about the complaints lodged against the school.
Prosecutors said many students who paid for phony credentials from Carleen and other schools often had previous medical experience — many were licensed practical nurses — and so, despite limited courses and little clinical work, were able to pass the National Council Licensure Exam, often known as the NCLEX, required for registered nurses.Then they got hired in hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities in Florida and across the country. One nurse with a Carleen “diploma” was later implicated in a patient’s death in St. Louis.
One student complaint noted that Carleen coursework was mostly test-prep for the NCLEX.
Investigators have said the schools involved in the Operation Nightingale scheme targeted immigrants, and many of the Carleen complaints do not appear to be written by native English speakers.
Students fear schools are ‘fraudulent’
Noreus first applied to start a program for aspiring registered nurses in November 2010, a little more than a year after Florida lawmakers voted to ease regulations on schools tasked with training new nurses, inviting new institutions to enter the market.
Her initial application for what was to become Carleen Institute of Health was denied, with the state’s former director of nursing education writing that the proposal did not comply with Florida’s requirements for curriculum and clinical training and that Noreus did not properly document her faculty members’ academic credentials.
But by October 2011, Carleen had been approved and reported more than 100 students had enrolled at its Broward campus. Two years later, Carleen opened associate degree programs at two more campuses in West Palm Beach and Palm Bay. The Brevard campus later was transferred to a different owner and renamed Jay College of Health Sciences, records from the state nursing board show.
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When Carleen operated legitimately, its students struggled to pass the NCLEX.
In 2016, no more than 20% of the associate degree recipients at any of the campuses passed the test on their first try, far lower than the 88% passage rate for graduates of nursing schools nationwide.
Because of those low scores, the Florida Board of Nursing, which approves nursing programs, in 2016 terminated the Broward campus’ associate degree program, meaning it could not enroll any new students. The nursing board, though, does not have the power to close nursing schools, only the ability to terminate specific programs. And the state commission, which can shutter schools, took no action.
In 2020, the nursing board voted to close the associate degree program at Carleen’s West Palm Beach campus, also because of low NCLEX scores.
But several students reported enrolling in the associate degree programs at those campuses after nursing board members told them they couldn’t take on any more new students, according to the complaints they sent the state.
One student told the state in July 2022 — six years after nursing board members voted to terminate the Broward program — they feared the school was “fraudulent.”
The student first wrote to the nursing board, asking if the school was authorized to offer an associate degree program. A staff member told them it was not.
The student then wrote to the education department, relaying how when questioned, Carleen leaders told them they were allowed to provide the student training to become a registered nurse because they had already been licensed as a practical nurse in Pennsylvania for more than two decades.
“I am very confused and would like to know if this nursing program is fraudulent or not,” the student wrote, noting they had already completed eight courses and paid more than $3,400 in tuition to Carleen.
The education department passed along the student’s inquiry to Sherri Sutton-Johnson, the director of nursing education for the nursing board, who confirmed the student’s suspicion the school was flouting the state’s rules.
“This program was not authorized to enroll/admit students last year (2021),” Sutton-Johnson wrote in an email to the education department.
But it’s not clear the education department did anything to intervene.
Another former student complained they couldn’t get transcripts from the West Palm Beach campus, which was keeping them from taking the NCLEX and then working as a registered nurse.
“Many students are affected by this online money extortion,” the former student wrote. “On behalf of myself and other students, we plead for your office to take a look into if the school has the certifications and credentials to teach the ADN program in the first place.”
The education commission voted to close the West Palm Beach campus in April 2022, though it is not clear why.
At Noreus’ trial, Bowman was asked about one of the complaints, sent by a now 55-year-old Jacksonville woman licensed to work as a registered nurse in Florida.
In early 2022, the woman wrote to the education department complaining that she didn’t have a clear transcript from Carleen. So though she’d graduated and passed the NCLEX, the state nursing board wouldn’t grant her a license because of the “illegible” document, she wrote.
The woman attended Carleen for only one month. She’d taken courses at another Florida nursing school but hadn’t passed the “progression exam,” so she enrolled at Carleen in July 2021, paying $3,000 for an “80 percent review completion course.”
That review course is not part of the requirements for an associate’s degree in nursing, Bowman testified, and commission rules require transfer students to complete 25% of their credits at the institution granting the degree.
By then, the nursing board had also prohibited Carleen from enrolling additional students in its associate degree program.
Yet the nursing board granted a license to the woman almost immediately after she contacted the state.
The woman remains eligible to work as a registered nurse in Florida and in most places in the United States through an agreement that allows nurses licensed in one state to work elsewhere.
Another former student became so frustrated with the school that they reached out to DeSantis in May 2021, telling him they were trying to work as a nurse in Washington state, but they couldn’t get Carleen to send their transcript so they could get licensed.
“Unfortunately, the school took my money and did not provide the service,” they wrote.
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