Pasco-Hernando State College Student Defense Lawyer

Students reach me about Pasco-Hernando State College at three points: when coursework turns into a dishonesty charge, often on the strength of an AI-detection report, when a temporary suspension removes them from campus before anything is decided, and, usually too late, after academic suspension has dropped them from courses they had registered for.

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at Pasco-Hernando State College?

Pasco-Hernando State College is public, a state actor, and the Fourteenth Amendment applies to it. Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975), requires notice and some kind of hearing before a suspension. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78 (1978), holds that academic dismissal is owed much less process than discipline. Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214 (1985), tells courts to defer to genuine academic judgment unless the decision is “such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms as to demonstrate that the person or committee responsible did not actually exercise professional judgment.” See due process at public institutions.

Florida then adds what no other state in my practice has. Fla. Stat. § 1006.60(3) is a statute, not a handbook courtesy, and binds every Florida College System institution. Subsection (3)(g) comes first: you may have an “advisor, advocate, or legal representative, at the student’s or student organization’s own expense, present at any proceeding, whether formal or informal,” and that person “may directly participate in all aspects of the proceeding, including the presentation of relevant information and questioning of witnesses.” No sanction threshold, no formality threshold. Wisconsin, the strongest of the other states I write about, lets a lawyer speak only when suspension or expulsion is on the table; Colorado, Nebraska and New Mexico offer nothing comparable. Three subsections travel with it: (3)(b) presumes no violation and puts the burden on the college to prove one by a preponderance; (3)(a) requires written notice seven business days out and, five business days out, the witness list and all known information “including inculpatory and exculpatory information”; (3)(h) gives an appeal of right to a senior administrator who must hear it. All of it arrived in 2021, so older accounts of Florida campus discipline are obsolete.

Enforcement runs through one door. Fla. Stat. § 120.81(1)(g) removes §§ 120.569 and 120.57, the contested-case machinery of the Administrative Procedure Act, from any proceeding deciding a student’s substantial interests at a state university or community college. There is no administrative appeal and no administrative law judge. What remains is common-law certiorari to the circuit court for the county where the college sits, under Fla. R. App. P. 9.030(c)(3) and 9.190(b)(3), filed within 30 days of rendition under Fla. R. App. P. 9.100(c). Nothing tolls that. The court asks the three questions in Haines City Community Development v. Heggs, 658 So. 2d 523 (Fla. 1995): whether due process was accorded, whether the essential requirements of law were observed, and whether the findings rest on competent substantial evidence. It reads the record and takes no new evidence.

Where do Pasco-Hernando State College cases come from?

Pasco-Hernando State College enrolls roughly 9,410 students, is based in New Port Richey, and is a public two-year member of the Florida College System.

Florida state colleges of this size carry the state’s health and public-safety training: nursing and allied health, radiography, dental hygiene, respiratory care, emergency medical services, fire science and law enforcement. Those programs run in cohorts, place students at clinical and agency sites the college does not control, and answer to accreditors and a state licensing board. A finding that costs a general-education student a semester is a different event for a student in one of them: a clinical site can refuse a placement, and a program can hold its own progression review. See nursing dismissal.

The stakes are timing and disclosure. A term out of a sequenced program is a missed cohort start, and the next is usually a year away. That is why the sanction is often more negotiable, and more important, than the finding. A dishonesty record is something a licensing board and a transfer institution will ask about, and Fla. Stat. § 1001.64(8)(a) lets a college deny enrollment because of misconduct.

Which process are you in, and why does that matter?

Pasco-Hernando sorts conduct into three levels, and the level decides the exposure. Level I runs from a written warning through loss of privileges, reprimand and restitution. Level II adds probation and permanent loss of privileges. Level III reaches suspension and expulsion. Academic dishonesty sits at Level II, and the code defines it to cover cheating, plagiarism and academic fabrication, expressly including artificial intelligence. That matters: an AI allegation here is a named code offence, so it is charged as a code violation and the full § 1006.60(3) package attaches, including the lawyer who may question witnesses. Read the page on AI accusations before you answer one.

Florida’s only decision applying the statute is a plagiarism case: Florida International University v. Ramos, No. 3D21-1281 (Fla. 3d DCA Oct. 20, 2021), where the hearing officer barred the student from questioning the accusing teaching assistant about bias and motive; the circuit court quashed the finding on certiorari and the Third District let that stand. Academic standing is different in kind, a grades calculation, and Beheshtitabar v. Florida State University, 432 So. 2d 166 (Fla. 1st DCA 1983), applying Horowitz, holds that academic dismissal requires no formal hearing. Match your letter to the track before answering: academic misconduct, conduct code charges, Title IX, or academic dismissal and suspension.

What should you do first?

Get the code from the catalog edition in force on your incident date and save a dated copy; the catalog is year-stamped, so check you are reading the current one. Then request Internal Management Memorandum #6-15, the Student Disciplinary Procedures, because that is where the procedure lives and it is not published with the code. Add the syllabus, the assignment instructions and any lab or clinical policy.

Then put the dates in writing. Ask the office named in your letter for the date, time and location of any proceeding, your deadlines, the witness list, and all known information relating to the allegation including exculpatory material. Fla. Stat. § 1006.60(3)(a) requires that disclosure five business days out, so the reply either produces it or documents that it was not. In an AI or similarity case, preserve drafts, version history, repository commits, learning management timestamps and group chats before anything auto-deletes: evidence of how the work was made is the answer to a detector score. Do not sit for an interview before you know what is alleged; § 1006.60(3)(d) gives you the right to remain silent and says silence may not be used against you.

What does Pasco-Hernando State College’s own policy actually say?

Fla. Stat. § 120.81(1)(e) exempts educational units from filing with the Administrative Code, so the college’s code is a board-adopted rule published in the catalog. It states the offences, levels and sanctions clearly but routes the procedure to a separate internal document. Where a field is unstated, this list says so rather than guessing.

• Conduct office: not named in the published code. No campus-specific conduct office located; your charge letter will name it.
• Governing policy: the Code of Student Conduct, a board-adopted rule under Fla. Stat. § 1006.60(1) and § 1001.64(8)(f). Formal complaints run under Internal Management Memorandum #6-15, Student Disciplinary Procedures, adopted pursuant to the code.
• Academic integrity: a Level II offence covering cheating, plagiarism and academic fabrication, expressly including artificial intelligence. Because it is charged under the code, the § 1006.60(3) protections attach.
• Temporary suspension: for an offence at any level, the President, a Vice President, a Provost or an Associate Dean may impose temporary suspension with conditions for readmission where there is reasonable concern for safety or a threat to the student or another person. It may not exceed ten class days, extendable only on a specific finding by a disciplinary committee that the student continues to pose a threat. This is one of the few day-counts the code publishes. See interim suspension.
• Appeal window and notice: neither is in the published code; both sit in IMM #6-15. No campus-specific day-count located. The floor is § 1006.60(3)(a), seven business days’ notice and five business days’ disclosure, and § 1006.60(3)(h), an appeal of right to a senior administrator who did not decide below.
• Standard of proof: not in the published code. No campus-specific standard of proof located. Fla. Stat. § 1006.60(3)(b) fixes it anyway: preponderance, with the burden on the college.
• Advisor: not addressed in the published code. No campus-specific advisor rule located; the silence costs nothing, because § 1006.60(3)(g) is statutory whether or not the code repeats it. Notify the office in writing that a legal representative will attend.
• Academic standing: under standards of academic progress. A 2.0 cumulative GPA is required for all hours attempted; below it you move to academic warning, then probation, then suspension, then dismissal for one major term. Students on warning or probation lose web registration and must register through an advisor. A suspension appeal goes to the assistant dean of student affairs after completing the Student Success Seminar at eighty percent or better and filing form SCN-34; the provost decides and sets re-enrollment conditions. Courses you are already registered for are dropped unless the appeal is approved by the date printed on your suspension notice, so that date, not a rolling day-count, is your deadline. Financial aid progress is a separate policy with its own appeal.

The gap here is procedural, not substantive. The code tells you what is prohibited and what can happen, but the process for contesting it sits in an internal memorandum not published alongside it. Request IMM #6-15 in writing from the office named in your letter and keep the response: a document you cannot read is not adequate published notice, and § 1006.60(3) requires the code to be published on the college’s website.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

A federal claim arising at Pasco-Hernando State College — Title IX, Section 504 and the ADA, or Fourteenth Amendment due process — is filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, where I am admitted to the bar. Few of these reach a courtroom. In Florida the campus stage is the case, because § 1006.60(3)(g) puts a lawyer in the room while the record is made:

• Reading the governing policy against the charge or decision letter
• Preparing your account, your documents and your questions
• Testing whether the school followed its own published procedure
• Scrutinising software-based evidence, including AI-detection and similarity reports
• Helping with the written response and the appeal, where policy allows
• Serving as your advisor where the process permits one
• Negotiating sanction terms, notations and disclosure language

Because academic fabrication by artificial intelligence is a named Level II offence here, a detector score arrives with a code provision behind it. Testing that evidence, and testing whether the college followed IMM #6-15, is most of the work. Be realistic about the remedy: at a public Florida college the route is certiorari or a federal claim, not money. Polk State College District Board of Trustees v. Fisher, No. 6D23-161 (Fla. 6th DCA Feb. 9, 2024), holds that a student’s relationship with a public institution is an implied contract, not the express written contract a claim against a state entity requires. A Florida college may also withhold a transcript or diploma until a sanction is complete, under § 1006.60(1).

Campuses and locations

One college-wide student conduct code and one academic-standing policy govern every location listed here — none of these campuses is separately accredited or separately reported, and none publishes its own conduct code. What does change from campus to campus is the selective or clinical program a student was dismissed from, which typically has its own program handbook with its own dismissal and appeal rules, and the administrator who handles the matter.

Every location below sits in the same federal district, so venue does not turn on which campus a matter arose at. The divisional courthouse is given for each.

Campus lists change. Locations were verified against the college’s own published locations page and county assignments were derived from 28 U.S.C. section 89; if a campus has opened, closed, or moved since, the college’s current listing controls.

Other Florida College System colleges in the same federal court

All twenty-eight Florida College System institutions are bound by the same statute — Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3), which gives a student an advisor, advocate or legal representative who may question witnesses, puts the burden on the college at a preponderance, and supplies an appeal of right. What differs between them is how faithfully each handbook reflects it, and several do not reflect it at all.

These colleges sit in the Middle District of Florida, with divisional courthouses at Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Ocala and Fort Myers. A federal claim arising at any of them is filed in that court, where I am admitted to the bar.

• College of Central Florida
• Daytona State College
• Eastern Florida State College
• Florida Gateway College
• Florida SouthWestern State College
• Florida State College at Jacksonville
• Hillsborough College
• Lake-Sumter State College
• Polk State College
• St. Johns River State College
• St. Petersburg College
• Seminole State College of Florida
• State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota
• Valencia College

Colleges in the other two districts are indexed on the Florida schools page — and note that several individual campuses sit in a different district or division from their own college’s main campus, which is set out in the campus table on each college’s page. For the statutory framework, the thirty-day certiorari deadline, and the colleges whose handbooks contradict section 1006.60(3) in writing, see Florida student defense. Where the dismissal came from a nursing or allied-health programme, that programme usually has its own handbook with its own rules — see nursing school dismissal and clinical removal.

The RN handbook has no appeal in it at all

The most consequential document at Pasco-Hernando for a nursing student is the RN programme handbook, and what is missing from it matters more than what is in it.

Searched end to end, that handbook contains zero occurrences of the words appeal, due process, complaint, or student rights. A document that governs dismissal from a selective clinical programme and never once mentions how to contest a decision is not a neutral omission; it shapes what students believe is available to them.

What it does contain are two hard dismissal rules. A two-strike provision, under which a second failure ends the programme. And dismissal for “ANY HIPAA violation, whether knowingly or unknowingly committed” — capitalised in the original. A strict-liability dismissal rule reaching unknowing conduct is severe by any standard, and it is the provision most likely to end a nursing career over an inadvertent act: a chart left open, a screen visible, a detail repeated in a corridor.

Neither rule displaces the statute. PHSC is a Florida College System institution, so Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3) applies to a proceeding that leads to dismissal whatever the programme handbook does or does not say.

Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3) binds every Florida College System institution. Subsection (3)(g) entitles a student to an “advisor, advocate, or legal representative” at any proceeding, formal or informal, who “may directly participate in all aspects of the proceeding, including the presentation of relevant information and questioning of witnesses.” Subsection (3)(b) puts the burden on the institution at a preponderance. Subsection (3)(a) requires seven business days’ notice and five business days’ disclosure including exculpatory material. Subsection (3)(h) supplies an appeal of right.

So the two things to do are straightforward. Invoke (3)(g) and (3)(h) in writing, by subsection, since the handbook will not tell you they exist. And on a HIPAA allegation, treat the knowledge question as the whole case: if the rule reaches unknowing conduct, then what actually happened, what was foreseeable, and what training the college provided all become the record. See nursing school dismissal.

The other Florida colleges whose handbooks depart from the statute, and the thirty-day certiorari deadline that follows a final decision, are set out on Florida student defense.

Common questions about Pasco-Hernando State College student cases

Does using AI count as academic dishonesty here?

The code says so expressly. Academic dishonesty is a Level II offence covering cheating, plagiarism and academic fabrication, including but not limited to artificial intelligence. That makes an AI allegation a charged code violation rather than an informal accusation, which cuts both ways: the exposure is real, but so are the Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3) protections, including notice, disclosure of exculpatory material, a preponderance standard with the burden on the college, and a legal representative who may question witnesses.

How long can the college keep me off campus before a hearing?

The code caps temporary suspension at ten class days. It may be imposed by the President, a Vice President, a Provost or an Associate Dean where there is reasonable concern for safety or a threat to the student or another person, and extended only on a specific finding by a disciplinary committee that the student continues to pose a threat. If you are past ten class days without that finding, say so in writing. It is an interim measure, not a determination of responsibility.

Where are the actual disciplinary procedures written down?

In Internal Management Memorandum #6-15, Student Disciplinary Procedures, which the Code of Student Conduct adopts by reference for all formal complaints. It is not published with the code, so request it in writing from the office named in your charge letter and keep the reply. Whatever it says, it cannot go below Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3), which sets seven business days’ notice, five business days’ disclosure, a preponderance standard and an appeal of right.

This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order. Other campuses are covered on the Florida schools page.

This page is informational and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the institution named on it.