Southland Beauty School Closes
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A beauty school is closing its campuses -- including about a dozen Southern California locations.
The Marinello Schools of Beauty announced Thursday that the decision was prompted by The U.S. Department of Education's move to cut off financial aid to students.
About 1,500 students are registered at the cosmetology school's campuses in West Covina, Palmdale, Whittier, Bell, West Los Angeles, Reseda, Burbank, Inglewood, San Diego and elsewhere in Southern California.
The DOE said it had determined that Marinello knowingly requested federal aid for students based on invalid high school diplomas, charging students for excessive overtime and engaging in other acts of misrepresentation.
"Our students depend on higher education institutions to prepare them for careers through a quality education," Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell said. "Unfortunately, some schools violate their trust through deceptive marketing practices and defraud taxpayers by giving out student aid inappropriately.
"These unscrupulous institutions use questionable business practices or outright lie to both students and the federal government, " Mitchell said. "In these cases we are taking aggressive action to protect students and taxpayers from further harm by these institutions."
In a statement, Marinello said the DOE's decision was unfair to students. "Our students have gone to great lengths to complete their education to better their lives," Marinello said. "The department's actions have deprived Marinello's students of the opportunity to complete their education at Marinello without interruption."
The school said that when the DOE began to withhold funds from students two months ago, Marinello officials asked for information about how to address the department's problems, but received no answer.
"We are confident we would have been able to address them given Marinello's long history of compliance with regulatory requirements," the statement said. "The department waited until we were past the point of no return financially to allow us any opportunity to respond to its unfounded allegations."