TSC Ghazvini Center for Healthcare Education Student Defense Lawyer

The Ghazvini Center for Healthcare Education at 1528 Surgeons Drive sits next to Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, and it is where Tallahassee State College’s nursing and allied-health programmes are taught. The college describes it as providing “cutting-edge training and simulation labs.” For a student facing removal from one of those programmes, the practical point is that the governing document is the programme handbook kept at Ghazvini, not the college-wide conduct code that applies on the main campus.

Why a health-programme dismissal is a different case

A student removed from a selective health programme is rarely removed by the student conduct office. The decision comes from a programme committee applying a programme handbook — a document carrying progression rules, clinical-performance standards, attendance limits, drug-screen provisions and automatic dismissal clauses that the college-wide conduct code never mentions. It usually has its own appeal ladder and its own deadlines, and those deadlines are often shorter than the college-wide ones. Where the two documents conflict, the handbook is what the programme applies — but the college code appeal should be preserved rather than abandoned.

The stakes are also different. Clinical hours do not transfer readily, cohort places are limited, and admission to another programme requires disclosure of the dismissal. For licensure-track programmes there is a further layer: a dismissal recorded as involving dishonesty, a patient-safety concern or a positive drug screen becomes a disclosure item on a licensure application years later. The wording of the decision letter therefore matters as much as the outcome, and it is worth negotiating.

A teaching hospital next door changes the facts

Clinical placement at an adjacent hospital means a second institution has a view. Dismissals in this setting frequently begin with a report from clinical staff who are not college employees, and the college may treat that report as settled fact. It is not. Who observed what, whether the student was told at the time, whether the incident was recorded in the hospital’s own system and whether the account changed between the report and the decision letter are all answerable questions, and they are answerable only if the underlying records are requested promptly.

Programme-level NCLEX pass rates and the Fla. Stat. section 464.019(5) framework are on the Florida nursing programme pass-rate page.

Venue

Leon County is in the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division, under 28 U.S.C. section 89(a).

This is a public college, so Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3) applies in full — including subsection (3)(g), the right to be accompanied by counsel at a disciplinary proceeding, and subsection (3)(b), which puts the burden on the college rather than the student. What those rights do and do not include is set out on the Florida student defence page.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

  • Request the clinical incident records from the placement site as well as the college’s file.
  • Get the current programme handbook and the edition in force at enrolment, and identify which one the college is applying.
  • Separate the academic-progression question from any conduct allegation — different processes, different deadlines.
  • Press on the wording of the decision letter, because it follows the student into licensure and transfer applications.
  • Preserve both the programme appeal and the college-wide appeal, and work to the shorter deadline.
  • Keep the 30-day certiorari window under Fla. R. App. P. 9.100(c) open while the internal appeal runs.

The main college page is here: Tallahassee State College student defence.

Other Florida colleges

Every school writes its own dismissal, appeal and conduct rules, and the filing deadlines are rarely the same from one campus to the next. These pages set out the procedure at other Florida colleges:

The one sentence that decides most Ghazvini Center cases

Tallahassee State College does not publish a nursing student handbook. Search the college website and you will not find one — the programme handbook is distributed inside Canvas. What the college does publish is a catalog page called Additional Healthcare Program Requirements, and one sentence in it decides most dismissals:

Students that do not meet these standards will not be allowed to progress to the next semester and will be dismissed from the program.

The standards are simple and absolute. Every graded healthcare course must be completed with a C or better; every pass/fail course with a pass; every satisfactory/unsatisfactory course with a satisfactory. There is no probation tier, no warning stage and no stated repeat allowance. One grade below the line ends progression. Re-entry is contingent on programme policy and space availability, and a returning student must satisfy the requirements in force at the time of return rather than those they started under.

The same page makes attendance mandatory in all classes, labs and clinical experiences, and notes that times and days vary and include evenings and weekends.

A note on names: the college was Tallahassee Community College until its 2024 renaming, and many of its own documents still say TCC. If you are searching for the policy that applies to you, search both.

Clinical agencies can end a programme the college cannot

The most important practical risk at a healthcare campus is that the decision-maker is often not the college. The catalog states that background-check and drug-screening results are submitted to the clinical agencies, that the agency determines whether the student may participate, and that if a clinical agency decides a student cannot attend, the student will not be admitted into or allowed to continue in the healthcare programme. Because completing clinicals is required for every healthcare programme, an agency’s refusal is effectively a dismissal — reached without any college hearing.

The college also warns students against CBD and hemp products, noting that clinical agencies will deny access where a screen indicates cannabis, and cautions that a positive background check may affect licensure eligibility even where the student is allowed to continue.

Published technical standards apply too. The Essential Functions of Nursing document sets twelve functional-ability categories including emotional stability, and states that accommodations compromising patient care or fundamentally altering the programme are not considered reasonable — while confirming that a student denied an accommodation may request an individualised determination to ensure the denial is not disability discrimination.

The appeal route, and the ground that fits a dismissal

There is no separate healthcare-division appeal body. The published route is the college-wide academic appeal — and critically, its list of grounds expressly includes inappropriate penalties for an academic honesty violation or programmatic progression. That phrase is the hook for a progression dismissal, and it is easy to miss.

The steps: confer with the instructor who issued the grade, no later than one year after it was posted; if unresolved, confer with the Dean within five working days; then petition the provost within five working days, with the signed written appeal due within 10 working days of that meeting — and the catalog states that if the written appeal is not provided in time, the procedure terminates. The provost notifies the student within 10 working days and may convene the Academic Appeals Committee. The provost’s decision is final.

Conduct runs on separate and shorter clocks under the Student Handbook and Code of Conduct: a report must be filed within 90 calendar days of the incident; the charge notice issues within 10 business days; the student receives at least seven business days’ notice of a proceeding and, five business days before it, a witness list and all known inculpatory and exculpatory information; and an appeal must be filed within five business days of the written decision or it becomes final. Academic misconduct is tighter still — a student has three instructional days to contest the charges and request a formal hearing. The appellate body may reduce but not increase a sanction.

Where a Tallahassee State College case would be heard, and the deadline nobody mentions

Tallahassee State College is a public institution of the Florida College System, and that changes the legal landscape. Section 1006.60(3), Florida Statutes, requires every Florida College System code of conduct to give a student at least five business days’ notice before a disciplinary proceeding and to disclose all known information relating to the allegation, including exculpatory information. Section 1002.21(2) provides that a public postsecondary student may be disciplined only after notice of the charges and a hearing on them.

Federal law then draws a hard line between two kinds of dismissal. In Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78 (1978), the Supreme Court held that an academic dismissal does not require a hearing at all — only that the student was fully informed of the faculty’s dissatisfaction and that the decision was “careful and deliberate.” Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214 (1985), added that a court may not override a genuinely academic judgment unless it is such a substantial departure from accepted academic norms as to show that no professional judgment was actually exercised. A disciplinary dismissal is different: Doe v. Valencia College, 903 F.3d 1220 (11th Cir. 2018) — a published Eleventh Circuit decision about a nursing student at a Florida College System institution — confirms that colleges must give notice and a hearing before suspending or expelling a student for misconduct.

Here is the part that catches health students out: a clinical failure counts as academic. The Eleventh Circuit applied exactly that framework in Page v. Hicks, 773 F. App’x 514 (11th Cir. 2019) (unpublished), upholding the dismissal of a nurse anesthesia student whose clinical supervisors judged her practice unsafe. Being removed from a clinical site therefore attracts less procedural protection than being accused of cheating, not more — which is why the wording of the decision letter matters so much, and why a case framed as unprofessional conduct rather than clinical deficiency may carry stronger rights.

The 30-day clock. The remedy for a student dismissed by a Florida public college is a petition for writ of certiorari to the state circuit court in Leon County, under Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.190(b)(3), and it must be filed within 30 days of the institution’s final decision under Rule 9.100(c). Decker v. University of West Florida, 85 So. 3d 571 (Fla. 1st DCA 2012), holds that review is available as a matter of right and that the clock starts when the student is told the decision is final. Missing it is not a technicality. In Sylvain v. Florida A&M University Board of Trustees, 204 So. 3d 162 (Fla. 1st DCA 2016), a student who skipped certiorari review was held to have failed to exhaust her remedies, barring her later suit. And Doe v. Valencia College holds that because Florida certiorari review is an adequate state remedy, a student who does not use it generally cannot bring a federal procedural due process claim either.

One more point worth stating plainly, because it is counterintuitive. A college’s failure to follow its own handbook does not, by itself, create a federal constitutional claim; Horowitz said so, and the Eleventh Circuit has repeated it. Broken internal deadlines matter on certiorari review, where a departure from the essential requirements of law is the standard — that is what happened in Morfit v. University of South Florida, 794 So. 2d 655 (Fla. 2d DCA 2001), where a suspension was quashed because the university ignored its own conduct code. A straight breach-of-contract suit against a Florida public college is the weakest of the three routes, because sovereign immunity requires an express written contract, which enrollment alone does not supply.

For reference, Tallahassee lies in the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division.

Common questions about TSC Ghazvini Center cases

Where does Tallahassee State College teach nursing?

At the Ghazvini Center for Healthcare Education on Surgeons Drive, adjacent to Tallahassee Memorial, rather than at the main campus.

A clinical supervisor reported me. Is that the end of it?

No. A report from clinical staff is evidence, not a finding. Who observed what, whether the student was told at the time, whether the placement site recorded it in its own system and whether the account shifted before the decision letter are all open questions worth pursuing.

Which federal court covers the Ghazvini Center?

The Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division. Leon County is in the Northern District under 28 U.S.C. section 89(a).

Does the college-wide code apply at Ghazvini?

It does, but a programme dismissal is normally decided under the nursing or allied-health programme handbook, which carries progression and clinical rules the college code does not mention. Both appeal routes should be preserved.