The Alabama Community College System (ACCS) erroneously identified a homeschool cover school as a diploma mill and stopped accepting its students. HSLDA successfully intervened.

In the many years she operated The Pearl Academy, Cynthia Hobbs had seen hundreds of her homeschooled students admitted to community colleges in Alabama and obtain financial aid without a problem. Then several of those community colleges started refusing to certify her students’ financial aid applications. This led to her students being refused admission. She contacted HSLDA in September with the news.

“It was very frustrating,” Cynthia said. She began operating the academy in 2023. Up until the issues they encountered in September, she added, “most of my students who went on to college never had a problem.”

At the time of Cynthia’s email to HSLDA, only two community colleges had begun discriminating against her students. But she soon got word that more community colleges had stopped certifying her students’ financial aid applications. I had a growing hunch the problem was more systemic than we’d thought.

The extent of the problem came to light after Cynthia showed me a letter she received from ACCS. It outlined new federal financial aid regulations aimed at shutting down diploma mills, and revealed that ACCS had wrongfully identified The Pearl Academy as one of them. Because of this misidentification, ACCS had instructed Alabama community colleges not to certify financial aid for any students from The Pearl Academy.

Cynthia explained that having her cover school disparaged as substandard was very upsetting because she believes so strongly in the benefits of homeschooling. She homeschooled her own children, and many of the students she teaches at The Pearl Academy come there because they struggled in public school.

Her academy served about 80 students last semester and enrolled 120 students for the current term.

I contacted Neil Scott, vice chancellor for student success at ACCS. He quickly arranged a virtual meeting with himself, ACCS legal counsel, and members of ACCS executive staff.

I represented Cynthia at the video conference.

ACCS officials explained they were following new federal regulation that prohibited financial aid certifications for students whose diplomas came from any entity that “requires little or no secondary instruction or coursework to obtain a high school diploma, including through a test that does not meet the requirements for a recognized equivalent of a high school diploma under [the financial aid regulations].”

Based on a cursory review of the information available on The Pearl Academy’s website, and without trying to contact the academy or Cynthia, ACCS had determined The Pearl Academy fit that definition.

I replied that federal law is clear: homeschooled students are eligible for federal student aid. The new regulation did not affect that. I also explained that The Pearl Academy is a homeschool cover school. (In Alabama, one way families can legally homeschool is by registering with a church cover school. These institutions provide a range of services, from help with record-keeping and administration to academic and extracurricular activities. Parents remain the primary instructors.) 

Neil assured me that he did not wish to cause unnecessary problems for homeschool students and promised to review the policy. In the meantime, he and I worked together to help individual students from The Pearl Academy receive admission—and financial aid—from Alabama’s community colleges.

A month later we received news that the problem had been solved. The vice chancellor informed me that ACCS issued guidance to all community colleges in Alabama to begin accepting and certifying financial aid for The Pearl Academy students. Moreover, ACCS had assembled a special team to review transcripts from other schools that seemed to “raise red flags” to ACCS.

The Pearl Academy was, to my knowledge, the first and only homeschool cover school in Alabama to face this issue. With the new ACCS policy, they will likely be the last as well. ACCS now has a new policy and means of investigating before simply labeling any school as a “diploma mill.”

Cynthia said it was a relief to learn that HSLDA had resolved the issue. She added that she can now focus on her core mission—helping students finish high school and develop goals for what comes afterwards.

“I get them excited about it,” she said.

I’m proud to have represented Cynthia and the Pearl Academy, and proud to have been a part of this major win for ACCS and homeschooled students across Alabama.