Atlantic Technical College Dismissal Lawyer — Coconut Creek

Atlantic Technical College in Coconut Creek is operated by Broward County Public Schools and was the district’s strongest nursing performer in 2025. Its adult practical-nursing program is taught at the Arthur Ashe, Jr. Campus in Fort Lauderdale, not at the Coconut Creek campus.

87.50% of 56 first-time candidates

The practical-nursing program passed 87.50% of 56 first-time candidates against a 77.17% floor, more than ten points clear. A second, smaller code at the affiliated technical high school passed 90.00% of 20.

A strong result narrows the college’s available arguments rather than the student’s. It cannot attribute a dismissal to an unprepared cohort when seven in eight passed, and it is under no statutory pressure that would explain removing a marginal student before the examination. What remains is a narrow, factual question: did the college apply its published progression rules to this student?

The Broward comparison

Broward County Public Schools runs three technical colleges with practical-nursing programs. In 2025 Atlantic passed 87.50% of 56, Sheridan Technical College 79.01% of 81, and McFatter Technical College 75.00% of 56 — McFatter below the statutory floor. Same board, same policies, same clinical market, twelve points of spread.

The statute that protects state college students does not cover you

Fla. Stat. section 1006.60 — five business days’ advance written notice of the charges, access to inculpatory and exculpatory information, an impartial hearing officer — applies by its own terms to Florida College System institutions and state universities. A district technical college is neither: it is a public school operated by a district school board under sections 1001.44 and 1003.02. Sections 1006.61, 1006.62 and 1002.21 are limited the same way. So a student here gets none of the statutory protections a student at the state college down the road gets.

What you have instead is constitutional, and the Eleventh Circuit has addressed this exact setting. Castle v. Appalachian Technical College, 631 F.3d 1194 (11th Cir. 2011) — a nursing student at a public technical college — proceeded on the footing that the student held a property interest in continued enrollment that could not be taken without due process, and recorded that denying a pre-suspension hearing is itself a violation. Wells v. Columbus Technical College, 510 F. App’x 893 (11th Cir. 2013), applied Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975), to a technical college suspension. Goss requires notice and an opportunity to respond before the sanction takes effect.

If the college calls the dismissal academic, Board of Curators v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78 (1978), removes the hearing requirement — but only where the institution evaluated the student carefully and deliberately and kept them informed of the deficiency and of the risk of dismissal. A competency-based dismissal is usually labeled academic for that reason, which is why the label is worth contesting.

The board has to decide, and often has not

Because no statute writes a conduct code for adult career-center students — section 1006.07(2) is written for elementary and middle and high schools — the governing document is the district school board’s own rules, adopted under section 1001.41(2) and section 1003.02(1)(c), which expressly covers adult and career education programs. Get the board policy, not only the college handbook.

And the decisive procedural point: per Fla. Att’y Gen. Op. 2001-05, a board may delegate the evidentiary hearing to a qualified hearing officer, but the final expulsion decision must be made by the board itself and cannot be delegated. In practice these removals are frequently handled inside the college by a director or a program committee and the board never votes. Where that happened there is a structural defect to raise that does not require relitigating the facts.

A school board’s final expulsion order is reviewed by appeal to a Florida District Court of Appeal under Fla. Stat. section 120.68. The notice of appeal is due to the board’s clerk within 30 days of rendition, and rendition happens only when the written order is filed with that clerk. The appellate court asks whether the board’s findings rest on competent substantial evidence in the hearing record, whether a material procedural error impaired the fairness of the proceeding, and whether the board misread the law — it does not reweigh evidence, so the record has to be built inside the board process.

Where a case is filed

Coconut Creek is in Broward County, which puts a federal claim in the Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division. Review of a final expulsion order goes to the Florida District Court of Appeal for the appellate district where the school board has its headquarters, or where a party lives.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

• Obtain the district school board policy as well as the college handbook, and hold the college to whichever is more demanding.
• Establish whether the school board itself decided the expulsion, or whether the college did it alone.
• Contest the academic-versus-disciplinary characterization, because it sets how much process was owed.
• Test the Horowitz minimum: was the deficiency identified in writing, and was the student warned that dismissal was possible?
• Preserve the 30-day appeal window, which opens when the board’s written order is filed with its clerk.

The full framework, and every Florida district technical college nursing program with its 2025 result, is on the Florida district technical college page. Program-level pass rates are tabulated on the Florida nursing program pass-rate page.

Where Atlantic actually teaches your program

If you are an adult in Atlantic Technical College’s Practical Nursing program, your classes are in Fort Lauderdale, not Coconut Creek. The college’s 2026-2027 Practical Nursing flyer and its 2026 Fall Schedule, dated August 18, 2026, both place it at the Arthur Ashe, Jr. Campus, 1701 NW 23rd Avenue, Fort Lauderdale: 1,350 hours, Monday to Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., starting in July, September, December, March and May. Patient Care Assistant, Central Sterile Processing Technology, Hemodialysis Technician and Medical Coder/Biller meet at Ashe as well.

The Fall Schedule lists three locations: the main campus and Technical High School at 4700 Coconut Creek Parkway, the Arthur Ashe, Jr. Campus, and an ESOL campus at Coconut Creek High School, 1400 NW 44th Avenue. Medical Assisting (900 hours), Pharmacy Technician (1,050 hours), Dental Assisting (1,230 hours), Patient Care Technician (600 hours) and Medical Laboratory Assisting (465 hours) are taught in Coconut Creek.

Your instructor, records and decision-maker may sit on different campuses, so ask in writing who decides. Which code applies depends on your status: page 48 of the 2026/2027 Broward Technical Colleges Student Handbook applies the Conduct and Discipline Code for Adult Students to adults and the District’s Code of Secondary Student Conduct to career dual-enrolled high school students.

The grade that ends a nursing course, and the 48-hour clock on a test

Seventy percent is the line, and it is not rounded upward. Atlantic’s Practical Nursing Program Syllabus, Course 1, 2026-2027 (updated June 26, 2026) says a student must earn 70 percent or higher to advance to Course Two and that “69.9% is recorded as 69%, not 70%.” The Course 3 and Course 5 syllabi repeat it for advancing and for graduating, and both theory and clinical must be passed, with a satisfactory clinical evaluation.

• Students have 48 hours after a test to dispute a grade, and a test review must be scheduled inside that window. After it, the syllabus says tests will not be reviewed.
• A nursing student may not miss more than 10 percent of classroom hours per course: 21.3 theory hours and one clinical day in Course 1, 13.7 hours in Course 3, 7.5 in Course 5.
• Arrival after 7:05 a.m. is late, attendance is recorded in 15-minute increments in FOCUS, and an emergency absence requires an email through CANVAS by 6:30 a.m. and a call to the nursing office by 6:50 a.m.
• “Plagiarism is grounds for dismissal,” and clinical rotations may fall on evenings or weekends.

The syllabi send students to a “PN Handbook” in CANVAS and a “Broward County Practical Nursing Handbook” for testing, academic integrity, dress code and attendance. Neither is on the public site, so ask in writing for the edition that applied when you started.

Handbook page 9 requires a Level II background check and a drug screening through Complio, and says a positive result means withdrawal or a bar from any Health Science program for one year from the notification date. Atlantic’s Fall Schedule adds that a student who is not cleared cannot reach clinical sites and so cannot finish, and that anyone entering or re-entering Practical Nursing must sit the TEAS.

How an appeal moves, and the deadlines that run in school days

Every level gives you five school days. Under “Right to Appeal & Grievance Procedures” (handbook page 37) you first meet the staff member involved; if that fails you submit a written statement to the Principal/Director within five school days of the last conference, and that administrator answers in writing within five. Five school days later you may ask the Director of the Office of Service Quality for an appointment; that office meets within five school days and answers within five. The last step is the Superintendent’s Office or designee, whose decision the handbook calls final for the penalty.

At the Service Quality meeting the handbook allows “any representative the student selects.” The code sets no notice period, no interim-suspension rule and no hearing before a sanction takes effect.

The sanctions are blunt. An administrator may suspend an adult student for up to 10 days or involuntarily withdraw the student for up to one school year from the date of the infraction, and breaking the weapons or the drug and alcohol rule carries withdrawal from all adult, alternative, technical and community schools for one school year. Rule 11 makes the grievance procedure the only appeal.

Atlantic’s handbook page still posts the Conduct and Discipline Code for Adult Students as a 2018-19 signature form numbered IF062-WEIM, dated 8/10/18; its eleven rules reappear word for word in the 2026/2027 handbook. Atlantic’s Grievance Process Overview says the grievance form must be requested from an administrator, though the college does post one, and it goes to a single employee’s district email address, not a shared mailbox.

Getting accommodations at Atlantic, and what a denial leads to

You start with the Office of Disabilities and documentation no more than five years old. Atlantic’s Disability Services page accepts a Transition Individual Education Plan, a psychological report or a letter from a physician, each showing the diagnosis, its impact and the accommodations recommended, and asks students to call the Disability Services Advisor for an intake meeting. Testing accommodations must be arranged before the Basic Skills or ESOL placement test, and handbook page 35 adds that accommodations are not retroactive.

If a request is refused, the handbook’s “Section 504 Grievance Procedures” (page 36) set the route: ask the Director for a Grievance Filing Form, and within 15 school days the Director issues a Grievance Resolution Notice upholding, modifying or denying what you sought. That notice goes to the district’s Equal Educational Opportunities/ADA Compliance department first, with three school days allowed for review. If you are still unsatisfied, you file with the Superintendent of Schools and request an impartial hearing through that department. The handbook points to a Section 504/ADA Procedural Manual at browardschools.com/ese-support, an address that now lands on a staff login page, so ask the college for it directly.

Other Florida technical and career institutions

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 technical and career institutions:

• Bene’s Career Academy
• Big Bend Technical College Dismissal
• Brightmed Health Institute
• Cambridge College of Healthcare & Technology
• Cape Coral Technical College Dismissal
• CBT Technology Institute

Common questions about Atlantic Technical College cases

What was Atlantic Technical College’s pass rate?

87.50% of 56 first-time practical-nursing candidates in 2025, against a 77.17% floor. A second code at the affiliated technical high school passed 90.00% of 20.

Does a strong pass rate hurt my case?

No — it removes the college’s excuses. It cannot say the cohort was unprepared, and it faces no statutory pressure to protect its numbers. The case becomes whether it followed its own rules for you.

Am I covered by Florida’s student discipline statute?

No. Fla. Stat. section 1006.60 covers Florida College System institutions and state universities. Atlantic is run by Broward County Public Schools, so the Fourteenth Amendment and board policy govern.

Which court hears an Atlantic Technical College case?

The Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division for a federal claim; review of a final expulsion order goes to the Florida District Court of Appeal for the appellate district where the school board has its headquarters, or where a party lives.

My daughter enrolled at Atlantic in Coconut Creek, so why are her nursing classes in Fort Lauderdale?

Because that is where Atlantic runs the program. The college’s 2026-2027 Practical Nursing flyer and its 2026 Fall Schedule both place Practical Nursing at the Arthur Ashe, Jr. Campus, 1701 NW 23rd Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, along with Patient Care Assistant, Central Sterile Processing Technology, Hemodialysis Technician and Medical Coder/Biller. It is the same college and the same rules, but the administrator who signs a withdrawal or answers a grievance may sit on a different campus, so ask in writing who is deciding.

Atlantic says my course grade was 69.9 percent. Can it be rounded to 70?

Not under the program’s own syllabus. Each 2026-2027 Practical Nursing course syllabus says a student must earn 70 percent or higher to advance, that grades are not rounded, and that “69.9% is recorded as 69%, not 70%.” The same syllabi give students 48 hours after a test to dispute a grade and to schedule a test review, so the place to fix a scoring error is inside that window, not after the final average is posted.