Carousel Beauty Colleges students still in the dark

Several former students at Carousel Beauty Colleges say they’re still in the dark days after the school abruptly announced it was shutting down all five of its campuses in the Dayton metro area after 57 years in business.

Francina Carr, a 25-year-old Dayton resident who attended classes at Carousel’s Springfield campus, said found out the school was closing from a classmate on Facebook over the Labor Day weekend but go not help from the school’s the admissions office when she contacted them Monday. She said she has not received any further communication from school officials other than the notice posted on a classroom door Tuesday announcing the school closing, which displaced more than 90 students.

Carr said she contacted the Ohio Board of Cosmetology to find out what her options might be and was told that the classroom credits she had accumulated would transfer to another beauty school. But she said she was not informed that she was eligible for a refund from the school. Under Ohio law, she is eligible because the school closed permanently and no longer offers instruction, according to the cosmetology board’s administrative code.

“I’m looking at enrolling in Creative Images (a cosmetology school with two locations in Dayton and Vandalia), and I’d like to get my student loan money back to pay for it,” Carr said.

Lisa Quesinberry, another Springfield student who said she was close to graduation, said she invested about $10,000 of her own money and federal student aid to attend classes before the school shut down.

But Quesinberry, 53, said she had no clue that under the law the federal student loans she used to pay for her tuition could be completely discharged if she decided not to transfer her credits and simply start over.

“I liked what I was doing, but I may want to do something else,” she said. “I don’t want to be on the hook for my Carousel student loans if I don’t have to be.”

Christopher Logsdon, executive director of the Ohio cosmetology board, said the board received an email notification from Carousel owner Don Yearwood early Tuesday morning that he was closing the schools immediately.

This media outlet contacted Yearwood and he had not returned calls for comment by late Thursday morning.