Five former students in Texas Wesleyan University’s Doctor of Nurse Anesthesia Practice program are suing the Fort Worth school, accusing it of admitting far more students than it had clinical training slots for and then dismissing first-year students without a fair process when the math didn’t work out. The suit was filed Oct. 2, 2026, according to local reporting from KERA and WFAA.
The plaintiffs — Aleksandra Castro, Linet Koshy, Alyssa Torrez, Eric Barretto, and Katherine Cox — enrolled in the DNAP program for the 2024–25 academic year. Nurse anesthesia programs are notoriously competitive to get into, and that scarcity is structural: clinical sites willing to supervise student registered nurse anesthetists are limited nationwide, and a program can only train as many students as it has placements to put them in.
The core claim: more seats sold than slots available
The lawsuit alleges Texas Wesleyan enrolled the cohort at roughly 10% above the number of clinical placements it actually had available, then dismissed students from the first-year class without clear, consistently applied standards. The students say they weren’t given meaningful due process — notice of specific deficiencies, a real opportunity to respond, or a transparent appeals process — before being cut from a program that, for most of them, represented a six-figure tuition investment and years of ICU experience required just to apply.
If you’re an ICU or ER nurse eyeing CRNA school — and a lot of you are, since anesthesia is one of the few paths to six-figure pay without leaving bedside-adjacent practice — this is the nightmare scenario nobody puts in the admissions brochure. Before you sign a DNAP enrollment contract, ask the program directly, in writing, whether its incoming class size matches its confirmed clinical-site capacity for that specific cohort, not just its historical average. A program that won’t answer that question plainly is telling you something.
Disability and records claims add a second front
Beyond the over-enrollment claim, the suit says some of the dismissed students had disabilities or disclosed medical emergencies that the university failed to accommodate. The students also allege Texas Wesleyan blocked their access to their own academic and clinical records while they were trying to prepare an appeal — which they argue violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal law that guarantees students access to their own education records. The plaintiffs are asking a court to reinstate them in the program and to award damages for the tuition, lost time, and career disruption the dismissals caused.
The university’s response
Texas Wesleyan has said it strongly disagrees with the allegations and will respond through the normal legal process. Citing the pending litigation, the university said it could not comment further on the specifics of the case. No hearing date had been reported as of this writing.
The case lands at a moment when nurse anesthesia education is already squeezed nationally. The American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology has flagged clinical-site capacity, not applicant interest, as the binding constraint on how many new CRNAs the country can train each year — which is exactly the tension at the center of the Texas Wesleyan suit: a program that keeps admitting bigger cohorts into a clinical pipeline that isn’t growing to match it.