For 25 years, Baldwin High School chemistry teacher Anthony Simonelli made the same offer to every student who walked through his classroom door: score a perfect 100 on the New York State Chemistry Regents exam, and he would personally drive to their house to hand over a $100 bill. Thousands of students tried. None succeeded — until Jojo Yawson did.
Yawson is now the first Baldwin High student confirmed to have achieved a perfect score on the Chemistry Regents, according to europesays.com. Simonelli, who had held the challenge open for a quarter-century, called it a long-awaited moment, and he made good on his promise, personally delivering the $100 prize to Yawson. As CBS News New York reported, correspondent Carolyn Gusoff introduced the student who finally ended the teacher's decades-long wait.
A Prize Two Decades in the Making
The structure of Simonelli's challenge was simple but ambitious: score a perfect 100 on the chemistry Regents, and he would drive to the student's house and hand them the bill in person, according to the newsbreak.com account of the story. Over the years, thousands of students passed through Baldwin's chemistry classrooms, and some came tantalizingly close to the perfect mark without ever reaching it, the same report noted.
Yawson said the cash incentive was more than a nice bonus — it genuinely pushed him during his studies. “It did matter a lot. It wasn’t in the back of my mind, it was in the front of my mind,” he said, per europesays.com. His mother added a personal touch to the milestone, saying her son should frame the $100 bill he received from Simonelli rather than spend it.
Overcoming Learning Differences Along the Way
Yawson's path to a perfect Regents score wasn't a straight line. His mother said he had to navigate learning differences and was homeschooled for several years before returning to a traditional classroom setting, according to europesays.com. That background makes the achievement land differently for his family, who watched him work through obstacles most students with a perfect score never face.
Looking ahead, Yawson said he plans to pursue a career in civil engineering, giving the chemistry milestone a clear throughline into his future academic path, per the same europesays.com report.
The Challenge Gets a Raise — And a Makeover
Simonelli isn't retiring the bet just because someone finally won it. Going forward, he's offering $200 for a perfect score on the revamped Regents exam, europesays.com reported, doubling the stakes for the next student who wants to try. The timing lines up with broader changes coming to the exam itself: the Chemistry Regents is set to undergo changes next year, according to the same report.
Separately, the New York State Education Department has indicated that updated Reference Tables for Physical Science: Chemistry should be used in classrooms beginning in the 2025–26 school year, with the June 2026 Regents Examination in Chemistry serving as the first test to use them. The department has also said it will provide guidance on administration and scoring during the June 2026 Regents Examination period and for a period afterward, per its own posted scoring information page.
For now, Baldwin's chemistry hallway has a new story to tell freshmen eyeing that $200 challenge: it has been done before, and the proof is framed on a wall somewhere in the Yawson household.
