Alonzo Yanes, Burned at School, Keeps His $60 Million Award While Teacher Anna Poole Gets a Raise From the NYC DOE

Alonzo Yanes after being set on fire

The picture above of burned student Alonzo Yanes says it all. A science teacher at his school, Beacon High School on Manhattan's West Side, did an experiment that she should never have done, and burned student Alonzo Yanes after her experiment went horribly wrong.

Anna Poole

There is more bad news that followed this event, as well as good news. The bad news is that the teacher who committed the misconduct, Anna Poole, was rewarded with a raise by the New York City Department of Education. She now is a teacher mentor at NYC DOE Headquarters, teaching other teachers how to teach chemistry. (This article is re-posted below as well). The good news is that Yanes gets to keep his $60 million award.

                                                                          Ruth Lacey

Principal Lacey testified "she made a terrible mistake" and cried on the stand, but was ousted from Beacon in August 2020, basically for this incident and her alleged "racist" policies.

‘Hypocritical’ Beacon principal squeezes rich parents while students rally against ‘privilege’

Some readers may say that I am a teacher advocate and therefore should support all teachers at all times.

I do not believe this. If I want to be believable in hearings or on my blog, (which I do),  I must dig into the facts of a story or case, and tell the reader those facts. If an educator is guilty of misconduct based upon a review of the facts, then I will say exactly that. I still argue for a punishment that is fair, based on the evidence, so I usually do not agree with a termination award and will fight to overturn any termination decision I think was not deserved.

In the case of Alonzo Yanes, I do believe that the NYC DOE should fire the teacher who caused such harm, Anna Poole. One of my reasons for feeling this way is that I know of so many cases where arbitrators have terminated good teachers for no reason or a low-grade accident or mistake that did not harm a child.

I just cannot accept the fact that Ms. Poole did such a stupid act and was rewarded, with her student suffering so much from his injuries.

Alonzo Yanes and his parents

More proof that the teacher disciplinary procedures and penalties must be changed and made more fair.

Betsy Combier

betsy.combier@gmail.com

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Anna Poole

 Promotion 'outrageous' for a teacher who set kid on fire, critics say

By LAURA DIMON, CATHERINA GIOINO, and BEN CHAPMAN

MAR 22, 2018 

City educators, parents, and students were sickened Thursday to hear an Upper West Side teacher found a pot of cash and a cushy job at the end of a rainbow experiment that burned two students.

Beacon High School teacher Anna Poole has landed $23,000 in raises since the 2014 accident that permanently disfigured one teen and prompted nearly $40 million in lawsuits.

She is now an instructional leader assigned to the Education Department headquarters and teaches city teachers how to perform science lessons.

New York City Parents Union founder Mona Davids was appalled.

"I think that's outrageous and ludicrous. It's actually insulting," said Davids. "But it's typical DOE. That's what they do, reward poor performance."

As an example, Davids cited former Bronx principal Santiago Taveras, who lost his job at DeWitt Clinton High School in a 2017 cheating scandal. Despite a probe that found he changed students' grades, Taveras landed in another high-paying city schools gig, as an educational administrator.

Poole, 35, was a rookie science teacher on Jan. 2, 2014, when a chemistry rainbow experiment went horribly wrong and caused a classroom explosion that injured two students.

"Oh my God, I set a kid on fire," Poole cried out, according to a Special Commissioner of Investigation report published five months after horrific blast.

But instead of firing Poole, Education Department officials gave her a new job as citywide instructional specialist, and a series of raises the agency said were contractually required. She currently makes a $79,484 a year — up from $56,048 on the day of the explosion.

City public school teacher and education activist Axia Rodriquez said Poole's plum gig shows the Education Department disciplinary system is upside-down.

"The DOE is helping this lady reboot her career because it was a tragic accident," said Rodriquez, who teaches English-language learners. "But when whistleblowers speak up, their careers are in tatters."

Queens teacher Bobson Wong said on Twitter that the city should put its brightest educators in positions to lead important professional development classes.

"I think this says a lot about the quality of professional development — who gets chosen to do it," Wong tweeted. "I wish teachers had more of an opportunity to run PD, but given how busy we are, this is difficult."

Beacon students were shocked that Poole is giving city educators lessons on how to lead science classes. The classroom blast she touched off four years ago melted the ear of one student, burned the forearms and hair of another, and left a third with PTSD.

So "maybe continuing to work with chemicals isn't a super responsible decision," said sophomore Henry Pearl, 16.

Poole didn't pick up her office phone when called for comment, and her coworkers at 52 Chambers St. said they were too spooked to comment on her story.

"Good luck," said one DOE staffer approached by a Daily News reporter outside Tweed Courthouse. "There's a lot of fear here."

Ben Chapman is an award-winning reporter who covers education for the New York Daily News. A graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Chapman has written more than 2,000 articles about New York City schools for the Daily News since joining the paper in 2009.

Alonzo Yanes at trial
photo: Steven Hirsch

NYC loses bid to reduce $60M payout to burned Beacon High School student

By Priscilla DeGregory, NY POST August 10, 2020

The city lost its attempt to avoid paying the $60 million verdict that was awarded to a Beacon High School student who was badly burned in a since-banned chemistry experiment gone awry, a judge ruled Monday.

Alonzo Yanes was awarded the stunning sum by a jury on July 1, 2019, following a trial that detailed how Yanes, then 16, suffered horrific and disfiguring burns on Jan. 2, 2014, after his chemistry teacher, Anna Poole, conducted a “Rainbow Experiment” that erupted in a fireball.

The trial also laid out the harrowing physical and emotional recovery that the teen went through in the months and years following the incident.

“All of this excruciating physical and emotional trauma experienced by Mr. Yanes has essentially stopped his young life before it even began,” Manhattan Supreme Supreme Court Justice Alexander Tisch wrote in a decision upholding the jury’s verdict.

The city last August filed a motion seeking to toss out or renegotiate the hefty verdict claiming that Yanes wasn’t nearly as disfigured as other accident victims in New York cases who have received smaller payouts.

Tisch said the verdict — which awarded for past and future pain and suffering — is appropriate as “Mr. Yanes was subjected to literally being burned alive.”

Yanes, now 22, spent painful months recovering in hospitals including undergoing skin grafting to his face, neck, arms, and hands and losing his ears, according to trial testimony. He has disfiguring scars on his face and body and has lost the ability to sweat and feel in the burned areas, a doctor testified.

“Having miraculously survived being severely burned and the related trauma of the accident, Mr. Yanes became acquainted with the agonizing pain and suffering he would have to endure daily,” Tisch wrote of Yanes’ recovery.

And as for his future, the judge wrote, “While Mr. Yanes is supposed to be entering the prime of his life, he has been unable to establish a romantic relationship and has never even experienced his first kiss or had a single sexual encounter.”

Tisch said there is no sign that these emotional consequences “will somehow lessen over the remainder of his life.”

The physical and emotional impact of the accident will continue to affect Yanes’ job prospects, his future relationships, his self-confidence, his independence from his parents, and his friendships throughout his life, Tisch said.

he jury “awarded a sizable, but fair monetary award for the substantial injuries … that Mr. Yanes has endured and is statistically likely to continue to endure for an additional 54 years post-verdict,” the decision read referring to Yanes’ predicted life expectancy.

Yanes’ lawyer Ben Rubinowitz told The Post he and his clients are “very pleased” with the decision.

“This young child suffered horrific injuries through the negligence of the Board of Education and a teacher who failed to provide protection for the students,” Rubinowitz said. “Although the award offers some measure of damages I know that my client would return it in a heartbeat if he could have his health back.”

The DOE deferred comment to the city Law Department.

Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci said, “This was a tragic incident and the experiment has been banned in our schools.

“While we respect the court’s ruling, we believe the award is not consistent with the awards that have been upheld by the courts in similar cases.”

Paolucci said the city is “reviewing the city’s legal options” when asked if there would be an appeal.

Jury's $60M Verdict in 'Agonizing' High School Student Burn
Case Upheld

As a chemistry teacher at Manhattan's Beacon High School "poured methanol from a gallon jug" into dishes containing nitrates, "a giant fireball erupted ... and engulfed" the student, and he burned for at least a minute, wrote the judge.

By Jason Grant, NYLJ, August 12, 2020

A Manhattan judge has upheld a jury’s verdict of $60 million in pain and suffering damages awarded to a former 10th-grade student who was “literally … burned alive” inside a massive fireball that leapt from a chemistry teacher’s nitrate-demonstration gone wrong.

Pulling repeatedly from vivid testimony given during plaintiff Alonzo Yanes’ 2019 damages trial, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Alexander Tisch describes how the then-student was sitting just two or three feet from his chemistry teacher in 2014 when she tried “to show the students how various nitrates, when lit, caused flames to appear in different colors.”

As the teacher at Manhattan’s Beacon High School “poured methanol from a gallon jug” into dishes containing nitrates, “a giant fireball erupted … and engulfed” Yanes, and he burned, according to witnesses, for at least a minute, said Tisch.

Then Tisch, in a 38-page opinion in which he chooses not to reduce or alter the jury’s large award in any way, lays out 21 pages of facts about Yanes’ immense suffering in the accident’s aftermath.

“Having miraculously survived being severely burned and the related the trauma of the accident,” Yanes next “became acquainted with the agonizing pain and suffering he would have to endure daily,” wrote Tisch. And he described how Yanes was quickly rushed from the high school to New York-Presbyterian Weill-Cornell hospital, where he’d stay for months.

Yanes “underwent approximately one hundred and twenty (120) medical procedures … for the debridement of dead skin, the implementation of temporary skin grafts from cadavers, and then … having his own healthy skin removed to replace the temporary skin grafts,” Tisch said. And he wrote that “this excruciating pain will be a constant companion to Mr. Yanes throughout his life as the amount of pain medication necessary to eliminate Mr. Yanes’ suffering would be fatal.”

“The emotional suffering that Mr. Yanes must endure on a daily basis is tremendous,” the judge also said, giving a plethora of examples—Yanes, even today, “refuses to wear his glasses when he is going from place to place so that he cannot see people gawking at his disfigurements.”

On Tuesday, a day after Tisch issued his decision, the city Law Department, which represents the suit’s defendants, including the city’s education department and former chemistry teacher Anna Poole, said it is unclear whether the defendants will appeal Tisch’s decision. It appears that if the defendants do appeal, and subsequently the Appellate Division, First Department were to uphold the damages award, the $60 million would be more than double—and perhaps more than triple—any past pain and suffering award ever affirmed on appeal in the state.

According to Benedict Morelli, a prominent personal injury lawyer in New York and nationally, his law firm has recently researched pain and suffering awards affirmed on appeal in New York State, and has found that if a $40.6 award million his firm secured in an unrelated case were to be affirmed, it would be more than double any pain and suffering award affirmed on appeal in state history.

In Morelli’s case, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice John Kelley issued a July 24 opinion in which he analyzed a jury’s $102 million damages award. Kelley ruled that the 30-year-old plaintiff, in that case, a severely brain-injured former construction worker, should recover $40.6 million in pain and suffering damages.

Still, Morelli contends that his chances for an affirmation of the $40.6 million award are stronger than in most cases because Kelley, in what Morelli said was a “rare” move, stated in his opinion that he himself, not only the jury, had assessed trial evidence. And Kelley wrote that evidence supported the award.

In the Yanes burn case, Tisch does not credit evidence on his own, but rather—and more traditionally—explains why the jury’s verdict ($29.59 million for Yanes’ past suffering and $29.59 million for his future suffering) is “based upon a fair interpretation of the evidence.” And historically, Appellate Division courts have dramatically reduced large personal-injury awards—often while finding a jury’s multimillion-dollar award significantly “deviated” from what would be reasonable compensation under the case’s circumstances.

Tisch on Monday, in assessing the Yanes jury’s verdict, painstakingly laid out the facts and key testimony regarding the then-16-year-old’s fireball accident, subsequent suffering, and expected future suffering.

Almost as painstakingly, he laid out a legal analysis—some 17-plus pages—supporting why he chose not to disturb the jury’s $60 million award in any way.

In analyzing whether the jury’s pain and suffering award needed to be changed on a legal basis, either because it “materially deviate[d] from what would be reasonable compensation under the circumstances,” or because of case law precedent pointed to by the defendants’ lawyers at the Law Department, Tisch said in part that “the jury carried out its duty based upon this Court’s charge on the law that if ‘the plaintiff is entitled to recover from the defendant, it must render a verdict in a sum of money that will justly and fairly compensate the plaintiff for all losses resulting from the injuries and disabilities he sustained’ … including the loss of enjoyment of life.”

He further wrote that “the cases relied upon by defendants”—in their motion to set aside the pain-and-suffering verdict or have it reduced—” are not fair comparisons to the sui generis nature of the injuries suffered by Mr. Yanes.” The judge added that Yanes’ case “is not a simple litigation over a broken leg or arm, but a determination of damages that required a substantial amount of subjective decision making by the jury.”

In an email Tuesday, the Law Department said in reaction to Tisch’s decision that “while we respect the court’s ruling, we believe the [jury's] award is not consistent with the awards that have been upheld by the courts in similar cases.”

“We are reviewing the city’s legal options,” said Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci,

He added that “this was a tragic incident and the [chemistry class] experiment has been banned in our [public city] schools,” such as at Beacon High School.

Ben Rubinowitz, the managing partner of Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf in Manhattan, which represent Yanes in the personal injury litigation, said Wednesday that he was “incredibly pleased with the depth with which [Tisch] reviewed and dissected the [case's] record, to explain his thinking for allowing this verdict stand.”

Addressing what he said he expects will be an  appeal of Tisch’s decision by the city, Rubinowitz said it has been his law firm’s “experience” that “the Appellate Division has been reluctant to allow some of these [large damages] verdicts to stand.”

“But,” he said, “when you have a case with facts like this one, we are hopeful that they [Appellate Division, First Department justices] will see the reasoning of the decision that Judge Tisch wrote, making clear why the award was appropriate.”

“We are both hopeful and confident that the facts of this case will separate this one from the others that have come before it,” Rubinowitz said.

Speaking of Yanes, the lawyer said that he is “a wonderful kid who has unfortunately been isolated by the effects of the injuries. But his family has faith in him, and he has worked tirelessly to deal with severe.” He added that Yanes is now 22 and is a student at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts studying animation.

“His mother and father are hopeful that the Appellate Division will understand the severity of the injuries that their son has lived with and will live with for the rest of his life,” Rubinowitz said.