AdventHealth University Student Defense Lawyer

Students at AdventHealth University call at three points: when a clinical instructor or preceptor writes up a professionalism concern, when a conduct charge arrives from the dean of students, and after a progression committee has already removed them from a program. In a health-professions school the third one is the most dangerous, because the record it creates is the record a licensing board reads later.

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at AdventHealth University?

AdventHealth University is a private nonprofit institution, and that fact sets the frame before anything else does. A private university is not a state actor. The Fourteenth Amendment does not reach it, so there is no constitutional due process claim to bring, and there is no petition for certiorari to a circuit court either — that route exists only for decisions of public colleges and universities. Florida settled the private side a century ago. John B. Stetson University v. Hunt, 88 Fla. 510, 102 So. 637 (1924), holds that the relation between a student and an institution of learning privately conducted is “solely contractual in character,” with “an implied condition that the student knows and will conform to the rules and regulations of the institution.” Your case is a contract case, and the contract is the catalog and your program handbook.

The second point is the one Florida students most often get backwards. Florida does have a real statutory due process code for campus discipline. Fla. Stat. § 1006.60(3) requires 7 business days’ written notice, disclosure of the evidence 5 business days out including exculpatory material, preponderance of the evidence with the burden on the institution, an appeal of right a senior administrator must hear, and at § 1006.60(3)(g) the right to a “legal representative” at “any proceeding, whether formal or informal,” who “may directly participate in all aspects of the proceeding, including the presentation of relevant information and questioning of witnesses.” That statute reaches every Florida College System institution and every state university. It does not reach AdventHealth University. Your protections are the ones the university wrote down for itself.

Those protections are worth enforcing, because Florida enforces private-school contracts with real money, and the leading case is a health-professions case. In Sharick v. Southeastern University of the Health Sciences, 780 So. 2d 136 (Fla. 3d DCA 2000), a fourth-year osteopathic medical student was dismissed about two months before graduation over a failing grade in his last rotation. A jury found the dismissal “arbitrary, capricious, and/or lacking any discernable rational basis,” and the Third District held his damages were not capped at tuition: lost future earning capacity is recoverable. A jury later awarded $813,000 past and $3.5 million future lost earnings, affirmed in Nova Southeastern University of the Health Sciences, Inc. v. Sharick, 21 So. 3d 41 (Fla. 3d DCA 2009). The limits are equally clear. Jallali v. Nova Southeastern University, Inc., 992 So. 2d 338 (Fla. 4th DCA 2008), holds that a university may change its degree requirements “if such changes are not arbitrary or capricious,” and that a court “will not interfere with a private university’s enforcement of its regulations” absent arbitrary and capricious action, bad faith or a violation of a constitution or statute. Tercier v. University of Miami, No. 3D22-1334 (Fla. 3d DCA Aug. 2, 2023) — a nursing dismissal two months before graduation — adds that “only specific promises … in a school’s bulletins, circulars[,] and handbooks … are enforceable.” A breach of contract claim is built from numbered steps the university published and then skipped.

Where do AdventHealth University cases come from?

AdventHealth University enrolls roughly 1,860 students in Orlando and teaches health professions: nursing and the allied health and rehabilitation fields, including imaging, physical therapy and occupational therapy. Confirm your own program’s name and its current progression policy against the catalog rather than relying on any summary, because in a health-professions school the standard you are accused of missing usually lives in the program document, not the general catalog.

That mix explains the caseload. The cases that end degrees here are rarely plagiarism cases. They are professionalism findings, removal from a clinical or fieldwork placement at the site’s request, and program dismissal on a progression standard rather than a cumulative GPA. Those three are frequently the same incident wearing three labels, and each label carries a different procedure. A professionalism finding and a nursing program dismissal are not the same case even when the underlying facts are identical.

The stakes are also different from a liberal arts campus. These are sequenced, cohort programs, so one term out is usually a year and a new cohort if there is a seat. And the finding does not stay on campus. Licensure and certification applications routinely ask whether an applicant has ever been disciplined, dismissed or withdrawn from a health-professions program, and a professionalism finding is exactly the kind of entry that has to be explained years later. That is why the wording of the finding, the transcript notation and the language of any dean’s certification matter as much as the outcome, and often more.

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

The label on the letter picks the decision-maker, the deadline and the protections, and a health-professions university runs several tracks at once. A code of conduct charge goes to the student affairs side. An academic integrity allegation runs under the academic honesty policy. A professionalism or clinical failure goes to the program’s progression or standards committee under its own policy. A failure to meet satisfactory academic progress is a financial aid determination with no hearing attached to it.

Answering in the wrong track spends the one response you get. Match your letter to the right process first: conduct code charges, academic dismissal and suspension, or a SAP appeal. If the letter is ambiguous, ask in writing which policy you are charged under, and keep the answer.

What should you do first?

Get the catalog edition in force on your incident date and your program’s own handbook and progression policy, and read the appeal section before the section on the standard you are accused of missing. Ask for the dates in writing: your response deadline, your appeal deadline, who decides, and whether an advisor may attend. Ask for the material the decision-maker will see, including anything the clinical site sent, and ask for it before the meeting rather than after the decision.

Preserve everything the clinical world generates and then deletes: preceptor evaluations, the site’s written request if you were removed, competency checklists, simulation scores, incident reports, shift schedules, emails with your clinical coordinator, and learning management timestamps. Do not sit for a professionalism or fitness meeting before you know what is alleged; those meetings often produce the sentence that later reads as an admission. If a documented condition or an accommodation that was never put in place is part of the story, that belongs on the record early — see 504 and ADA accommodations. If the accusation rests on a similarity report or an AI-detection score, read the page on AI accusations first.

What does AdventHealth University’s own policy actually say?

This is where an AdventHealth University case has an unusual practical problem, and it is worth being direct about it. The university publishes its student conduct policy inside its online academic catalog, and that catalog sits behind a protection layer that blocks automated retrieval, so the page cannot be pulled and archived the way a PDF handbook can. Open it in a browser, save a dated copy of every section you rely on, and do not assume the wording you read today is the wording that governed your incident date.

• Conduct office: the student conduct policy is published in the AdventHealth University academic catalog. Ask the dean of students’ office in writing to confirm which official receives and decides your charge, and keep the answer.
• Governing policy: the university’s own code of conduct and academic policies. No Florida College System rule and no Board of Governors regulation governs a private university, so there is no system-wide code sitting above it and nothing to appeal to outside the institution.
• Academic integrity: the academic honesty policy in the same catalog. In a health-professions program, ask whether your program handbook adds a separate integrity or professionalism standard, because it usually does.
• Appeal window: no campus-specific day-count located. Do not guess it and do not rely on what an administrator says on the phone. Ask in writing for your appeal deadline, the officer it goes to, and the form it must take, and keep the reply.
• Standard of proof: no campus-specific standard of proof located in a publicly retrievable version of the policy. Ask for it in writing. At a Florida public college it is fixed by statute at preponderance with the burden on the institution, § 1006.60(3)(b); a private university is free to set a different one or none at all.
• Advisor: no campus-specific advisor rule located. Ask, in writing and before any meeting, whether you may bring an advisor, whether that advisor may be an attorney, and whether the advisor may speak. Those three answers change what a lawyer can do for you, and the answer differs between the conduct track and a program progression committee at the same institution.
• Academic standing: AdventHealth University does not publish an academic standing or progression policy at a public URL. Request the current policy in writing from the dean of students’ office or the registrar and keep the response, because an inaccessible link is not adequate published notice of the standard you are being held to.

Put those requests in one short written message, dated, and send it before the meeting. A university that cannot produce the policy it is enforcing, or that produces a version different from the one in force on your incident date, has handed you the strongest argument available under Tercier: a specific promise, in writing, that was not kept. That is the record an appeal is built on.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

A federal claim arising at AdventHealth University — Title IX, Title VI, or Section 504 and the ADA — is filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, where I am admitted to the bar. There is no Fourteenth Amendment claim against a private university, and the contract claim under Stetson and Sharick is a state-law claim. Almost none of these matters reach a courtroom. What decides them is the campus record:

• 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

What a lawyer can actually do here turns on the policy, and at AdventHealth University the first job is getting the policy. Some tracks allow an advisor who may be an attorney, some allow a silent advisor, some exclude outside people entirely, and a program progression committee often runs on different rules from the conduct office down the hall. Reading the current policy is what settles it. In a health-professions case the negotiation over how a separation is recorded, and what a future licensing application will have to disclose, is frequently worth more than the argument over what happened.

AdventHealth University’s associate nursing program passed under half its candidates in 2025

AdventHealth University reports two Florida nursing codes, and the contrast between them is stark. The Orlando associate-degree program passed 46.88% of 32 first-time candidates against a 76.05% floor — fifteen passes and seventeen failures, so more candidates failed than passed, roughly twenty-nine points below the statutory minimum. The university’s other nursing code passed 81.25% of 112, comfortably above the applicable floor.

That configuration is the useful part. The associate program cannot readily be defended on the basis of the applicant pool, the faculty or the clinical partners, because the parallel program at the same university drew on those and performed well. For a student dismissed from the associate program on progression grounds, the internal comparison is the one worth drawing, and the university generated it itself.

Under Fla. Stat. section 464.019(5)(a)1 a Florida nursing program’s first-time NCLEX passage rate must stay within 10 percentage points of the national average for comparable programs — in 2025 that floor was 76.05% for associate-degree programs and 77.59% for baccalaureate programs. Section 464.019(5)(a)2 puts a program two consecutive years below the floor at risk of probation and loss of approval, and section 464.019(5)(c) then obliges the program to disclose that probationary status in writing to its students and applicants. A single year below the floor is not probation, and the Board of Nursing publishes no probation roster — but the Department of Health’s licensing portal does publish a current status for each approved program, so it can be checked there as well as in the board’s minutes and orders. Full tables are on the Florida nursing program pass-rate page.

What the figure does is explain the pattern. A program under pressure to raise its first-time pass rate has an institutional reason to remove students it predicts will fail, and progression rules get applied more strictly than they read on the page. That is a fair point to put to an institution, and a reason to check the rule actually applied against the rule as published.

Other Florida universities

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 universities:

• Albizu University Miami
• Ana G. Méndez University Florida
• Atlantis University Miami
• Ave Maria University
• Barry University
• Chamberlain University Florida

Common questions about AdventHealth University student cases

Does the Florida student due process statute protect me at AdventHealth University?

No. Fla. Stat. section 1006.60(3) requires 7 business days of notice, disclosure of the evidence 5 business days out, preponderance of the evidence with the burden on the institution, an appeal of right, and a legal representative who may question witnesses. It reaches only Florida College System institutions and state universities. AdventHealth University is private, so neither that statute nor the Fourteenth Amendment applies, and there is no petition for certiorari to a circuit court. Your protections come from the catalog and your program handbook.

How do I get the policy if the catalog will not open?

Request it in writing from the dean of students’ office, and ask for the edition in force on your incident date rather than the current one. Ask in the same message for your appeal deadline, the standard of proof, and whether an advisor may attend and speak. Keep the reply. A policy you cannot reach is not adequate published notice, and a university that enforces a rule it will not produce has given you a real argument on appeal.

Will a professionalism finding follow me to a licensing board?

Assume it can. Licensure and certification applications commonly ask whether you have been disciplined by, dismissed from or withdrawn from a health-professions program, and the answer is a document you will be reading back years from now. No campus-specific disclosure rule located, so ask in writing what will appear on your transcript, what the university will say if a board or a future program asks, and whether the language can be agreed. That negotiation is often the most valuable part of the case.

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.