9/11 Reflection
On the early morning of September 11, 2001, I had arrived at school at about 6:30 as usual and had no reason to believe it would be other than a typical day. After greeting students as they arrived on their buses and chatting with parents dropping off their kids, I was working with a small group of students in the library for about half an hour.
When I returned to our office, Donna, the school secretary, informed me that she heard on the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. I was not particularly surprised by this because I recalled that a small plane had crashed into the building a few years before and a B-25 bomber had hit the Empire State Building during World War II. However, we turned on the radio to the news and the bulletins began to become more intense as the situation was unfolding a few hundred miles away.
By 10:00 the school’s phone was being jammed with calls from parents wondering what we were going to do about school. Were we sheltering in place, closing early, asking parents to pick up their kids? We really had no idea at that point what exactly had happened and what the proper response should be. We were also unable to get any official guidance because we could not contact the superintendent’s office because their phone lines were jammed too. We did not get cell phone reception in our building, so few people on the staff had personal phones or brought them to school.
By noon the severity of the attack was becoming clearer. There were just a couple of hours before the end of the school day, so the decision was made to send students home on the buses as usual. As Principal, I felt it was necessary to prepare the children for what to expect when they got home. Remembering the panic and media frenzy following the Kennedy assassination when I was in elementary school, I decided to speak to the children class by class.
I began with the kindergarten where we sat down in a circle and I told them that something very bad had happened while we were in school. It had happened far away in New York City and that we were all safe. However, when they got home their parents might be very upset about it and regular things like TV shows might not be on. No one knew for sure what had happened, so there might be a lot of confusion for a few days and they should not be surprised or afraid. I went class to class with the same message and tried to answer any questions as best I could.
Once students were safely loaded onto the buses, most of the staff did not linger and headed home early to take care of their own families or learn more about what was going on. My own reaction was to try to do something helpful and I discovered that there was a blood donation going on at Middlebury College. I don’t know if this was previously scheduled or a spontaneous reaction, but I headed there assuming that this was a mass casualty event and vast quantities of blood would be needed for the wounded.
When I arrived at the college, it was clear that many others had had the same reaction. Several hundred students and townsfolk were waiting to donate. The tone was somber and nearly silent. Like me, everyone seemed to want to do something and this was the one thing we could actively do in the moment. It took about two hours to work my way through the lineup. I imagine the drawing continued for several hours after I left. Tragically, as it turned out, there were few survivors in need of blood.
When I got home, my wife and I turned on the news and for the first time began to hear and see the details of what had actually happened. There was a lot of confusion in the minute-by-minute news flashes. We also learned of the other plane attack on the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. We learned that Vermont National Guard fighters had been scrambled and were patrolling the coast from New York to Maine. At that point it was unclear who was responsible, if we were at war, if additional attacks were imminent, or what the proper response should be.
A flurry of emails came through that evening about how the schools should respond. It was decided that the best course of action was to try to keep things as normal as possible and we would have school as usual the next day. I don’t recall exactly what I was thinking as we went
to bed that night, but I am sure it occurred to me that this was a momentous event that would have lasting repercussions. What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was how fundamentally it would change life in America and much of the rest of the world.
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