We do not "have" a private college and nor are we a private college.
We are licensed by the State as a Private School, which means we must conform to State standards and that they keep tight tabs on on.
It goes back to 1986, our first year with PhotoReading. We received a letter from the Department of Education saying it was a criminal offense to teach reading improvement in the State of Minnesota if we were not licensed as a private school.
The fines were ridiculous. I believe they were 30 days in jail and $250 for each day we were in violation.
So, we quickly applied, but it was the second worst experience of my professional life. It took five months of excrutiating work. The easy part was submitting the curriculum design document for our programs. But they would not review our application. In the mean time we were prohibited from doing business. After several months the process finally began, but only after my dad called a classmate, the Governor.
One of their excuses was that they did not have expertise to evaluate our system. Finally they found one who studied the program and interviewed nearly every graduate and issued a glowing report, the contents of which we are prohibited from releasing.
Everything from commas in our promotional material to how many file cabinets we had was controlled.
The night before we had what we were hoping to be the final visit from a State inspector, someone broke into our classroom and stole our stereo system. The inspector withheld our license because we had immediately replaced the stereo but the model number and serial number of the new system was not recorded with them.
In retrospect, the process forced us to institutionalize our business which worked to the benefit of our students as well as our business.
The laws have changed a lot since then. As a matter of fact, we are no longer required to be licensed, but every October we go through the process to maintain our license, which is now through the Minnesota Higher Education Services Office.
We survived financially during the process because we had classes outside of Minnesota. We still held classes in Minnesota, because we could not charge for them. When we got our license we sent a letter to the graduates, everyone of whom then sent in their tuition.
So, that's the story of our being a private school.
