They were promised to code jobs in the Appalachians. Now, they say that it was a fraud.

The promised class of 16 weeks lasted 17 weeks. Then, 18, then 19 years old. As the course progressed, many students began to run out of money. Out of more than two dozen students who started, about 10 left late October, some playing computer games in class to pass the time, waiting for the final project before graduation.

A fateful trip

From the beginning, Ms. Laucher had suggested that the project would interest the community, perhaps a game app aimed at fighting the opioid epidemic. Then the project was finally announced: the design of a website for a pet bed and breakfast that Mrs. Laucher's mother was opening in Pennsylvania.

But Stephanie Frame was still a believer. When she learned that a trip of the leaders of Mined Minds to a technical conference in Lithuania in November had taken place, she seized the opportunity. She had never left the country, but it was a way to find a job, for her and for her daughter. Her husband agreed to spend $ 1,000 for the trip.

"If I could stay with them," she remembers thinking, "be one of them, show them how dedicated I am, how much I supported them, so we got them back. ; have ".

While Stephanie and others were in Lithuania, the rest of the class wondered whether to wait until graduation. A Pennsylvania news channel reported problems with the Mined Minds program, including that almost all graduates of one class had been fired just after being hired as apprentices. The state of Pennsylvania has ordered Mined Minds to shut down for not having obtained a school operating license.

One morning in late November, during the first class following the conference on Lithuania, Beckley's students came to a shocking development. Two people who had participated in the trip – Stephanie Frame and Mr. Moore, their teaching assistant – had been excluded from the program.

At a videoconference, Ms. Laucher told the class that Stephanie had been fired for "extreme sexual harassment, a lot of drunkenness, behaving in ways that did not tolerate the spirit of Mined Minds" .