Connecticut Attorney General William Tong says about a thousand former students could benefit from a $5 million preliminary settlement with Stone Academy, the for-profit nursing school which suddenly shut down in 2023 as it faced an Office of Higher Education investigation into its alleged educational failures.
The students were locked out when Stone closed its three campuses, in East Hartford, Waterbury and West Haven. Many had paid tuition and were left with nothing in return, while having to put their dreams of becoming a nurse on hold.
The school faced lawsuits from the state and from students. The settlement, if approved by a judge, would resolve both.
“This is best way for me, and for all of us, to get money to students, and to get money for test prep, and to get money for people to resume their training and their career goals and aspirations,” said Tong, appearing at a Friday morning news conference alongside members of his staff and former Stone educators. “This is the best and quickest and most complete way to provide relief to students.”
Stone Academy ownership, led by Joseph Bierbaum, will pay the settlement. Multiple former employees and the attorney general say Bierbaum put “profits over people,” keeping millions of dollars as students received a subpar education.
“You’ve heard about how students were told they would get practical training. They didn’t get it,” says Tong. “How they were told they’d be prepared for the certification—the NCLEX (nurses’) exam—and they weren’t ready.”
Accounts investigated by the state suggest Stone Academy was otherwise failing in its educational mission, with students lacking basic training materials and some being passed through programs they were not qualified to pass.
“They would pass people on that didn’t quite meet high standards of being a nurse,” says former director of nursing Lisa Palmer, “because once you were in the school, you paid, but if you were to leave the school, you might get some money back. So, they kept a lot of kids in the school that shouldn’t have been there.”
Former employees say they tried to change things at Stone, with little success.
Lauren Kuzara, former director of Stone’s West Haven campus, says the school continued to enroll students during the COVID pandemic when it was clear it could not adequately educate the students it already had.
“All of us at the top kind of went to administration and kept saying, ‘Stop enrollment, we’re not providing the right education, this is not going to be what the students deserve,’” says Kuzara. “We were constantly just told, ‘Keep going, you’ve gotta do it.’”
Fed up in 2021, Kuzara says she, two other campus directors and a nursing director resigned together.
Palmer quit later on: “I finally left when ‘the businessman’ Mr. Bierbaum stopped listening to the director of nursing on how to help these students. All of our things that we wanted to do, things we wanted to help students with, it just went on deaf ears.”
Perry Rowthorn, an attorney for Stone Academy, did not reply to a request for comment.
Beyond the pending payouts, there is additional help for the former Stone students. In a statement, Tong’s office writes, “the settlement outlines a series of measures to assist impacted students in completing their education and professional exams, including remedial programs and the potential for students to complete their studies through Griffin Hospital School of Allied Health Careers.”
