Three years ago, state Rep. Carolina Amesty’s family wanted a Florida license for the small, unaccredited university they run from a busy commercial street west of Orlando.
Central Christian University applied for that license by submitting documents showing it had professors with graduate degrees, including some from elite schools such as Georgetown and Harvard.
But five people listed as faculty in Central Christian’s application, including those with degrees from highly selective colleges, never worked for the university.
Amesty, 29, an Orlando-area Republican elected to the Florida House in 2022, notarized one of those documents, claiming Robert Shaffer, a veteran educator with a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, started work at the university in Pine Hills in August 2021.
Shaffer, however, said he never worked there nor signed the form Amesty claimed he did.
“If I was called to court, I would say that is not my signature,” Shaffer said.
Three handwriting experts consulted by the Orlando Sentinel said the signature likely wasn’t his, with one saying there was “no chance” Shaffer had signed the document.
Two of the experts said the Shaffer signature might have been written by Amesty, who used her notary stamp to swear under Florida law the signature was authentic. The third agreed Amesty’s penmanship resembled the handwriting on the signature line of Shaffer’s personnel form but didn’t weigh in on whether she wrote his name.
Amesty has repeatedly declined to be interviewed by Sentinel reporters, but through her attorney, she sent an affidavit swearing that she saw Shaffer sign the form the day she notarized it.
Using the credentials of Shaffer and four other men with graduate degrees likely helped the school get a state license, as the rules require most instructors to have advanced degrees.
The names and academic qualifications of the five men who told the Orlando Sentinel they never worked for the institution appeared under the “faculty” heading in Central Christian’s two most recent catalogs, including the one for the 2023-24 academic year. The state requires licensed institutions to provide their catalogs to all their students.
Florida first granted Central Christian a license in 2022 and renewed it last year. The school needed a license to switch from offering religious classes, which are exempt from state licensing, to secular ones in fields such as hospitality management and psychology.
Amesty is running for re-election this year to represent a district that takes in much of southwest Orange, including Walt Disney World, and part of northwest Osceola County. She currently has no opponents.
During her first campaign, she touted her role as Central Christian’s vice president and her current website calls her a “lifelong educator.”
In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, Amesty earned $107,000 from Central Christian, a salary that exceeded the earnings of her father, the institution’s president and founder, according to university tax forms and Amesty’s elected official financial disclosure forms.
No longer an employee
Todd McMurtry, her Kentucky-based attorney, said in an email in late February that Amesty is no longer a Central Christian employee.
McMurtry also said the university’s consultant, not Amesty, was responsible for the catalogs and an error on Amesty’s own personnel form submitted as part of Central Christian’s application.
The form, which Amesty signed, claimed she had a master’s degree from a Russian university – a credential McMurtry would not confirm – and incorrectly reported the date of her bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida.
Amesty was listed as Central Christian’s contact person on its application for a provisional license and its application for an annual license submitted in January 2023. She also spoke on the school’s behalf in 2022 and 2023 when the state considered Central Christian’s requests.
The consultant, Jose Otero, denied his firm was to blame for any wrong information on Amesty’s form or the catalogs. His firm helps clients put together applications for a state license but is not responsible for the accuracy of documents, according to the contract they sign, he said.
The form with Shaffer’s disputed signature, the catalog listing men who never worked at Central Christian and Amesty’s personnel form are among dozens of documents the Sentinel obtained in September and October as it continued to report on Amesty and her family’s school following an investigation it published in August.
The Sentinel’s August story detailed how Amesty’s family-run university and shuttered fast-food restaurant were delinquent on taxes and utility bills, how she had not been truthful about the success of her businesses when she ran for office and how the school falsely claimed on its website that it had Ivy League-educated professors.
The story also said that Central Christian submitted a faculty list to the state that included four men who were not employees. The Sentinel did not learn until after that story published that Shaffer also was not an employee, bringing that total to five.
Amesty, who refused to answer questions before that story published, sued the newspaper for libel in January, claiming it had harmed her reputation. The Sentinel stands by its story.
Amesty’s lawsuit focuses on Central Christian’s faculty list. She claimed the paper misunderstood Florida licensing rules for private colleges like the one her family runs and that listing “potential” employees was allowed while a school waited to be granted a license and permission to enroll students.
If the state “required faculty to be hired and paid before approval, it would be fiscally impossible for small schools to apply for program approval,” McMurtry wrote in an email to the Sentinel in January.
But the new documents the newspaper received in the fall show Central Christian sent its faculty list – with the names of men it had not hired – to the state when asked for a roster of “current faculty members.”
Amesty’s attorney filed the lawsuit against the Sentinel on Jan. 4, the same day a reporter emailed the lawmaker a list of questions about the school, including one about the faculty listed in the catalogs.
The state licensing process
Central Christian is licensed by the Commission for Independent Education, part of the Florida Department of Education. The commission licenses trade schools and private schools such as Central Christian that aren’t accredited and don’t meet the standards required for their students to receive state or federal financial aid.
Accredited institutions like Rollins College in Winter Park and Stetson University in DeLand do not need a state license to operate in Florida.
The commission’s seven members are appointed by the governor and a majority represent institutions the commission licensed.
Central Christian, founded in 2003, told the state last year it had closed out its religious programs and had 15 students enrolled in its new, non-religious offerings. Because it is not accredited, students may not be able to transfer their credits to other institutions or be eligible for admission to graduate programs.
The education department, part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the commission’s licensing rules or Central Christian’s application, failing to respond to questions emailed on July 20, Sept. 29, Dec. 14 and Feb. 9.
In March 2023, the Sentinel asked for all documents submitted to the state by Central Christian University in the past three years. Two weeks later, a spokesperson said the department had provided everything requested. But in September and October – after repeated requests from reporters who’d learned other documents likely existed – the department provided more documents, among them Shaffer’s personnel form.
The form said Shaffer started work at the university on Aug. 20, 2021.
But Shaffer, a veteran K-12 educator, said he worked for two years as principal of Central Christian Academy, a separate private K-12 school run by the Amesty family, leaving at the end of the 2022-23 school year, and was never a university employee. The two schools are independent legal entities but share a campus on North Hiawassee Road.
Shaffer filled out most of the form, printing his name at the top and writing in information about his academic degrees, professional experience and state licenses, he said in an interview. He added that Amesty told him the state required it for private K-12 school employees, though that is not true.
At the Sentinel’s request three handwriting experts, all with experience testifying in court, independently reviewed the university form and other examples of Shaffer’s signature – including those on a mortgage, a property deed and a traffic ticket – and agreed that it was probable Shaffer did not sign the document.
As a notary public, Amesty is a state-appointed official who can certify the authenticity of signatures on important documents. Under Florida law, using a notary commission to “falsely or fraudulently” certify a signature is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
In her affidavit, Amesty wrote that on Sept. 15, 2021, Shaffer, who had recently been hired as the principal for the K-12 school, came to her office and signed the document. He also said he could teach English composition at the college but wanted to focus on the academy, she added.
Last year, Shaffer decided he was “getting too old to manage the responsibilities and voluntarily retired” from her family’s school, the affidavit said.
Amesty’s attorney also sent the Sentinel signed affidavits from two other Central Christian employees. Both wrote that Shaffer had become forgetful.
Shaffer is 87 and has had a long education career, mostly in public schools. He is now teaching at an A-rated charter school in Central Florida.
He declined to discuss in detail his time working at Central Christian.
“I left because I was dissatisfied with the direction the school was taking,” he said.
Shaffer said he never discussed with Amesty that he might also teach college classes. He doesn’t know why he did not sign the form but guesses he did not see that a signature was requested.
The handwriting experts
The handwriting experts the Sentinel consulted are all certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners. In addition to Shaffer’s personnel form, reporters sent them a sample of Amesty’s handwriting from a letter she wrote in 2017 to an Orange County judge about a traffic ticket.
Thomas Vastrick, based in Apopka, said the personnel document looks to contain handwriting from two different people, which is consistent with Shaffer’s recollection that he filled out most of the form but did not sign it.
“The evidence supports his statement,” Vastrick said.
The handwriting on the signature line of the form – which Shaffer says is not his – also contains “comprehensive handwriting similarities” to the penmanship on Amesty’s letter to the court, he said. In particular, Vastrick noted the double letters, “ff,” in Shaffer’s name on the signature line resemble those in the word “affidavit” in the example of Amesty’s handwriting from court records.
Kevin Kulbacki, another expert whose firm is based in Chicago, noted those similarities, too, and said Amesty may have written Shaffer’s name.
He reviewed the form and three examples of Shaffer’s signature. The man’s writing, both his small printing and his script signature, shows “a very consistent style,” he said.
The Robert Shaffer written twice in the notarization section of the employment form, however, looks quite different, falling “outside the range of variation of his writing” seen in the samples.
The writing in that section does not “match the very tiny writing” printed on the form, which Shaffer says is his, nor does it match the signatures known to be Shaffer’s, Kulbacki said.
Steven Drexler, an expert in Alabama, said there was “no chance” that the handwriting in the notarized portion of the personnel form was Shaffer’s.
He agreed there are “similarities” between the example of Amesty’s penmanship found in court records and the signature on Shaffer’s personnel form but not enough to form an opinion about whether she wrote Shaffer’s name on the signature line.
Tiffany Hurst, executive director of the commission that licensed the Amestys’ school, and Mildred Coyne, the commission’s chair, did not respond to the Sentinel’s Feb. 9 email asking if Shaffer’s contention that he didn’t sign the form would impact Central Christian’s license.
The school’s application
When Sentinel reporters approached Hurst at the commission’s public meetings in Orlando in late September, she declined to discuss details of Central Christian’s application.
She said, however, that state rules do not explicitly say the faculty list submitted as part of a licensing application must contain current employees, as Amesty has argued.
A two-sentence email Central Christian requested and received from a commission staff member on Aug. 8, hours after the Sentinel’s first story published, made the same point.
But Hurst would not explain the state’s standard for evaluating the faculty lists of those seeking a state license.
And Central Christian’s provisional license hinged on the school providing “documentation confirming current faculty members,” according to the Jan. 28, 2022, order sent by the commission to the school. A copy of that order was among the documents the Sentinel received from the state in October.
The commission also wanted “supporting credentials for all newly hired faculty that will be teaching the programs,” the order said.
In response, Central Christian sent to the state its “current faculty listing to include sufficient members to teach the proposed programs,” the list the Sentinel referenced in its Aug. 8 story. The school also sent notarized personnel forms for the 10 people on the faculty list, including the one for Shaffer with the signature he says is not his.
Another form was for Joe Durso, a former mayor of Longwood, who said he spoke briefly with Amesty in the fall of 2021 about teaching at Central Christian and sent in some preliminary paperwork but then had no further contact with her. A few months later, he accepted a job outside Florida and moved out of the state in early 2022.
Durso’s name and credentials, including a master’s degree from Harvard, are listed in Central Christian’s 2022-23 and the 2023-24 catalogs.
Early in Central Christian’s licensing effort, Amesty provided false information about her own credentials on a form submitted to the state in 2020.
The form claims she earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida in 2017, though UCF said she is a 2019 graduate. Amesty has previously misrepresented her UCF graduation date, posting on social media that she earned a degree in 2016.
McMurtry blamed Central Christian’s consultant for the error. He said Amesty signed it without spotting the wrong graduation date. He said the form was “later corrected,” though no other version of the form was provided to the Sentinel when it requested all of Central Christian’s licensing documents from the state.
The form also claims Amesty earned a master’s degree from Moscow State University in 2018 — after spending five months at the Russian school and at a time when she was still completing her bachelor’s degree in Florida.
That credential is not on her LinkedIn page, nor on the biographical section of her page on the Florida House’s website.
McMurtry said Amesty studied at the Russian university “at different periods over multiple years,” taking some graduate classes.
He said it was difficult to equate course work at a foreign university to “a traditional U.S. university degree,” that the consultant had little space on the form to explain that, and that “the word master’s was the equivalent word to the graduate level work she did at Moscow State.”
But Manya, an India-based partnership with The Princeton Review, says on its study abroad website that master’s programs at Russian universities require a bachelor’s degree for admission and typically take two years to complete.
Otero, founder of Otero Consulting Group based in Kissimmee, said his staff does not fill in the state-required personnel forms for clients nor alter them before submission to the state.
“We got it as is, already notarized,” he said of Amesty’s form.
Talking about faculty
When Amesty and other Central Christian officials appeared before the commission on Jan. 11, 2022, one of the commission members asked about faculty credentials, noting the school had few faculty who held advanced degrees.
“In regards to faculty listing, we have professors that have graduated from Georgetown, the University of Florida,” Amesty said in response.
Scot Hamilton, who has a Ph.D. from Georgetown, said he applied for a job at Central Christian in 2021 to teach psychology. He was not hired but is listed in both the 2022-23 and 2023-24 catalogs. No one else on the list is a Georgetown graduate.
Shaffer is the only person with degrees from UF included on the faculty list and in the catalogs, but he said he was never an employee of the university.
McMurtry said Amesty did not misrepresent the school’s faculty list at the commission meeting because commission members understood the list would be potential hires, not employees.
“Rep. Amesty’s unscripted public comments did not cause any confusion to the Commission, as the commissioners understand the process,” he wrote.
Amesty also did not put together Central Christian’s catalog, he said. “Rep Amesty had no involvement in this,” he added.
But Otero, who has consulted schools on state licensing requirements for more than a decade, said his firm is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information, including instructor credentials, listed in the catalogs.
Once a catalog is complete, Otero said, his staff sends it to the client to review before submitting it to the state.
“We assume that the information they give us is truthful and accurate,” he said.
McMurtry also downplayed the importance of the catalog. “The catalog to which the Sentinel is referring is NOT listed on Central Christian’s official website and is NOT and has NEVER been advertised in any shape or form,” he wrote.
But state rules say the catalogs “shall constitute a contractual obligation of the school to the student and shall be the official statement of the school’s policies, programs, services, and charges and fees.”
The Sentinel told Hurst, the commission’s executive director, in September that Central Christian’s 2023-24 catalog included people who had never been hired.
“I’ll be happy to take a look at it,” she replied.
She and other education department staff have not answered follow-up emails, however.
The Sentinel also asked if Central Christian received special treatment because Amesty was a state lawmaker.
“Absolutely not,” Hurst said. “All of our institutions are treated the exact same.”
anmartin@orlandosentinel.com; lpostal@orlandosentinel.com
