Hartford — Connecticut's attorney general sued a for-profit nursing school and its owner Thursday, alleging they left hundreds of students in the lurch when the school abruptly closed its three campuses in the state in February while reaping millions of dollars in profits.

Attorney General William Tong filed a civil lawsuit against Stone Academy's parent company, owner Joseph Bierbaum and another for-profit Connecticut school owned by Bierbaum — Paier College. Several students also are suing Stone Academy and Bierbaum in a separate lawsuit.

Tong said the students were deprived of nursing careers at a time when more nurses are needed nationwide to deal with multiple health crises including opioid overdoses and COVID-19.

Stone Academy, in a statement, called the lawsuit baseless and blamed other state agencies for forcing the school to close. Bierbaum declined to comment through a lawyer.

Tong said Stone Academy aggressively used marketing to recruit students, many of them Black and Hispanic women who took out loans and used their life savings to pay the more than $30,000 in tuition and other costs to become licensed practical nurses. But the school provided an inadequate education and left them ineligible to take licensing exams and obtain state nursing licenses, he said.

Tong also accused Bierbaum of funneling nearly $1 million a year from Stone Academy to subsidize Paier College, between 2019 and at least 2021, while students at Stone Academy lacked books, lab supplies and at times heat and running water.

The lawsuit seeks millions of dollars in restitution for the students and penalties for alleged violations of the state's unfair trade practices laws.

“What we’ve seen is not just unjust and wrong but we’ve seen ... Connecticut families, working women devastated by this crisis,” Tong said at a news conference in Hartford. “Stone promised hands-on training from industry leaders and education that would position students to become licensed practical nurses in less than two years. These were lies. Lies. This a textbook case of consumer deception."

Tong's office began investigating Stone Academy after it closed its three campuses in East Hartford, Waterbury and West Haven in February as the state Office of Higher Education was raising concerns about the school and seeking an audit.

Tong said officials found, among other things, that the school knowingly hired instructors who were not qualified to teach under state regulations and provided only a fraction of the 860 hours of hands-on clinical experience it promised — creating a backlog of more than 1,000 students seeking that clinical experience as of late 2020.

State officials also said the average passing rate on a national nursing exam for Stone Academy students was well below the 80% rate required by the state.

In a statement emailed to The Associated Press, Stone Academy said it was trying to “wind down” operations in a responsible way when the Office of Higher Education ordered it to close within two weeks without any teaching plan in place.

“Stone’s efforts have been focused on helping students, but this lawsuit will require Stone to aggressively seek to hold OHE’s leadership and other state officials accountable for their severe mismanagement of this matter and the harm they continue to inflict on hundreds of students and graduates,” the statement said.

Tong said the school was wrongly blaming state officials for its own failures.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers and Gov. Ned Lamont approved a new state budget that requires the Office of Higher Education to refund the tuition paid by certain Stone Academy students, using an already existing fund for helping students when private schools close.