Starting next school year, the State College of Florida will no longer offer college-level courses in Sarasota and Manatee county high schools.
Instead, students can only access dual enrollment classes online or at SCF campuses.
On their website, SCF said the college found "academic quality inconsistencies" when the program was taught elsewhere, instead of on one of their campuses and that the college’s accreditation agency recently increased the standards for course rigor in dual enrollment courses.
But Sarasota Schools Superintendent Todd Bowden said the district wasn't given the chance to work through any perceived problems.
"Any instructor who teaches a dual enrollment course has to be credentialed thought the college,” he said. “There was not an instructor who did not meet their standards who they had not credentialed to teach those courses. I'm confident that we could have come to a resolution that satisfied and addressed any concern that the college had. We did not get the opportunity to do that."
About 1,120 students are taking dual-enrollment college credit courses at Manatee and Sarasota high schools this year.
The Sarasota and Manatee School districts were informed of the decision Tuesday. That evening, the Sarasota School District unanimously approved the State College of Florida's new charter collegiate high school in Venice.
SCF already operates a tuition free charter middle school in Bradenton.
Copyright 2018 WUSF Public Media - WUSF 89.7
