By Jacob Stackable, The Whetstone

Junior Alex Stathis didn’t know what was wrong.

“I was submitting my classes and it said I needed my adviser’s permission,” the history major said. “She gave it to me and it still wasn’t working.”

He was eventually able to register but by then it was too late.

“Four of the classes were full, of the five I registered for,” he said.

The problem? Many students were left unable to register for their spring classes because of a medical records processing error, which triggered a medical “hold” on their accounts, and caused many to miss registering for classes they wanted or needed.

Whose fault was that? It depends on who you ask.

CastleBranch, the outsourced service that Wesley College uses to process students’ medical records, said it was Wesley’s fault. Wesley said it was CastleBranch’s fault.

“It was a medical hold,” Deborah Forbes, director of student health in the Wellness center, said. “CastleBranch had different standards and then they overcorrected, which made students who were approved no longer approved.”

CastleBranch told a different story.

“The school puts their own trackers in place,” Tina Ashworth-Debeass, a CastleBranch representative. “They failed to tell us about the new guidelines for student forms and that’s what caused the problem.”

She said it might have had something to do with the changeover at Wesley’s Wellness Center.

Wellness Center Director Jill Maser left in August, and the Center was closed until Sept. 5.

“It’s affected me greatly,” sophomore Joshua Roberts said. “Right now I only have two classes. I’m talking to the other two professors and for the third I already got declined.”

Roberts has since gotten four of the five classes he wanted.

For students, the problems with CastleBranch aren’t new.

“The app doesn’t even work,” sophomore Brandon Lee Morgan said. “I had to take all of my stuff to the Wellness Center.”

Students must pay a $35 fee and download the CastleBranch app on their phones. Once completed, students can take photos of their forms and await their confirmation. The app shows a list of the documents needed for approval. For most students, the papers get rejected.

The problem prevented Morgan from using school services.

“They rejected me for everything,” he said. “I can’t even check my grades. A year and a half now and I can’t even get lunch. They won’t give me swipes.”

Freshmen field hockey player Jessica Behornar had difficulties uploading her physical documents on CastleBranch.

“It rejected my information even though what I submitted was correct,” she said. “It took me up to the last day that it could be accepted before preseason. I called them and they walked me through the process but it did take multiple days and I eventually got I fixed.”

Forbes said everything was fixed by the second week of November.

“I recommend updating everything again, that way you don’t miss any pieces,” she said. “We have a spreadsheet that has everything the students are missing.”

Students who are still having problems with CastleBranch can call its help line at 888-666-7788.

Whetstone reporters Althea Mignone and Lily Engel contributed to this report.