What rocket scientist decided this?
Teacher who botched experiment that left 2 kids burned by fireball got a raise. Now she instructs other staff on how to do science lessons!
Four years after exclaiming, “Oh, my God, I set a kid on fire!” Anna Poole (right) has a plum new job with the Education Department, making $23,000 more than when her science experiment went horribly wrong.
A FORMER Upper West Side science teacher who torched two kids with a fireball during a dimwitted experiment has landed a plum job instructing educators — on science-teaching techniques.
Anna Poole, 35, badly burned her Beacon High School students on Jan. 2, 2014, during a chemistry “rainbow experiment” gone horribly wrong. The botched demonstration resulted in three ongoing suits against the city for nearly $40 million.
“Oh, my God, I set a kid on fire!” Poole exclaimed, according to a Special Commissioner of Investigation report released five months after the disaster.
Yet instead of firing Poole, Education Department officials gave her a new job and a series of contractual raises. She currently makes $79,484 — up more than $23,000 from her $56,048 salary at the time of the fireball.
Poole’s climb up the department ladder to a position in its central office perplexed education observers.
“You don’t get a job like that unless you know somebody and you get slid into a slot at central, which is a very good gig,” education advocate Betsy Combier said.
Poole was removed from the classroom weeks after the incident and sent to a so-called rubber room, where she performed administrative tasks while taking homeapaycheck.
In November 2015, city Education Department officials reassigned Poole to agency headquarters, where she got the role of citywide instructional specialist.
In her new job, Poole helps develop instructional resources for science teachers and deliver professional development courses for the educators.
“It seems to me that she has something to offer and is likely older and wiser,” said CUNY and Brooklyn College education professor David Bloomfield. “(She) may have more to offer by way of safety and caution in the teaching of laboratory science.”
Poole had been on the job just five years when she conducted the doomed rainbow experiment, a trick that involves burning chemicals in Petri dishes to create multicolored flames. She poured methanol from a one-gallon bottle into hot lab dishes containing nitrates that had been on fire only moments earlier.
The liquid burst into flames, creating a blazing ribbon that whipped through the classroom of the elite Manhattan school and enveloped student Alonzo Yanes. A janitor who saw the aftermath told investigators that Yanes’ left ear “melted.” He also said the smoldering teen “looked like a victim from a battlefield.”
“There was a giant fireball and I was engulfed in flames,” Yanes himself told told a city attorney in a 2014 interview that has not been previously reported. “All I remember hearing was a sizzling sound and me yelling.
“I believe that was my skin starting to char up,” he said of the hissing he heard.
As Yanes, then 16, waited for medics to arrive, Poole sobbed beside him. He suffered second- and third-degree burns to his face, neck and torso,
“She said, ‘I’m sorry, Alonzo, I’m very sorry,’ ” he recalled.
“She choked up on her words and she sounded kind of hoarse. . . . I said, ‘It’s OK’ but she said, ‘No it’s not.’ ”
Yanes was put in a medically induced coma for three days and required at least five surgeries. A second 16-year-old student, Julia Saltonstall, was hit by the flames, leaving burns on her forearms and setting her hair on fire.
Yanes’ family seeks up to $27 million and Saltonstall’s family filed a notice of claim for $10 million.
A third student who suffers from PTSD over the 2014 blast seeks an amount to be determined at trial.
Their attorneys declined to comment.
City Education Department spokesman Douglas Cohen wouldn’t say who made the decision to give Poole a job teaching teachers how to give science lessons or what factors were considered in it.
“Any pay increases were related to contractual obligations — she remains a teacher under contract,” Cohen said.
City investigators determined Poole missed or ignored federal warnings against rainbow experiments that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board published just weeks before the incident.
“Ms. Poole is no longer teaching in a classroom and does not work on any professional development or instructional resources related to chemistry,” Cohen said.