How did 9/11 change the classroom? Miami teachers reflect on how they’ve adapted
Dannielle Boyer began her first day of teaching on Sept. 11, 2001.
The 24-year-old walked into her 8:30 a.m. Westview Middle school classroom with her “First Days of School” handbook, a gift from her aunt, and her Delta Sigma Theta bag swung over her shoulder.
The night before, she deepconditioned her hair and picked out a pair of black slacks and a high neckline blouse. She rehearsed how to greet her students, how to make them feel welcome. She did not anticipate the PA announcement interrupting her sixth-grade class.
A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
“‘My God,’ that’s exactly what I said, ‘my God,’ and tears started to roll down my eyes,” said Boyer, who is originally from New York.
Boyer and other teachers are now reflecting on how their classrooms and teaching have changed in the 20 years since 9/11. Since then, schools have become increasingly vulnerable to acts of violence on campus and around the community. Elementary, middle and high schools have improved security, adopted locked-door policies, introduced activeshooter drills, and require students to wear IDs.
Educators recognize that they not only have to teach algebra and grammar, but act as the first line of defense against a potential attacker.
9/11 IN THE SCHOOL CLASSROOM
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Boyer, eager to mingle with her students, jumpstarted her class with an icebreaker. Each sixth-grader grabbed a handful of Skittles, and with every color, described an aspect of their personality. Within minutes, the PA blared there was an accident at the World Trade Center. A plane had crashed into its North Tower. Her students locked eyes on the classroom TV as a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, barreled into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.
“I will be honest with you, I think I kind of froze,” Boyer said. “I did. And I gasped, I gasped in front of the kids.”
As hundreds of students left their classrooms and settled into the gym at the Northwest Miami-Dade school, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. Although her fear heightened, she said she stayed calm and consoled crying students.
“I know I was lying to the kids and I said, ‘Everything’s gonna be fine, don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s just an accident,’ ” she said. “We lied.“
At the time, Mindy GrimesFestge, the secretary and treasurer of United Teachers of Dade, taught kindergartners at Dr. Frederica S. Wilson/Skyway Elementary. While in a parent teacher conference at the Northwest Miami-Dade school, a secretary nudged them to come and see what was unfolding on TV. Grimes-Festge described the panic.
“We had a lot of parents come, and they were signing their students out,” she said. “It was a very scary situation, I mean thinking back to it now, it doesn’t even seem like it was 20 years ago. It seems like it was yesterday.”
The next day, about 100 kindergartners gathered on a carpet decorated with multicolored letters and numbers. The teachers struggled to explain what happened.
“Even though we’re telling our kids we’re going to keep you safe, we have no way of knowing this,” she said.
As her 25 kindergartners shuffled into her class, the students became curious.
One student asked what kind of bad people would do this? Another questioned why would they hurt people?
Were people not nice to them?
In the weeks following the attacks, Grimes-Festge said the school hired more security personnel, and teachers became more cautious when taking students outside. Side doors were kept shut, and if
someone knocked, students were told not to answer it, she said.
“A lot of times the biggest impact is when children are hurt, when children die,” Grimes-Festge said. “And so that was a fear among many teachers at the time, that somebody would try to do something at a school.”
The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, where a former student returned with an assault rifle and killed 17 people, has led to even more security measures such as the need to show school ID.
When entering teaching more than 30 years ago, Grimes-Festge didn’t expect to also serve as a line of defense.
“I don’t think anybody ever thought of teachers as first responders but that is what we are now,” she said.
SHIELDING STUDENTS IN WESTON
Andrea Gelman, a kindergarten teacher who taught at Gator Run Elementary in Weston on 9/11, remembers shielding the news of the terrorist attacks from her kids and shifting the TV out of the children’s view.
“It just brings up too much stuff that my kids just don’t understand,” she said. “They come into kindergarten, some of them are 4, some of them are just turning 5.”
With parents rushing to pick up their kids, only one or two of the 20 were left by the end of the day, she said.
Gelman recalls doing an active shooter training at her current Coconut
Creek school, Tradewinds Elementary, in January 2018 and detailing what she learned to her daughter. The next month, her daughter, Haylee Gelman, was trapped on the third floor of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and used her mother’s guidance to direct students away from the door and to a hiding spot.
It was the aftermath of walking through a murder scene, her mother said, and stepping over bodies as they left the building that was the most traumatic. Fortunately, everyone in her classroom survived.
Gelman said that security has increased at Tradewinds Elementary, including the introduction of a school resource officer and a dog that, at times, roams the school to sniff for weapons. But she feels that these actions are not enough.
“I was mad at the system for a really long time because I think we failed my daughter,” she said.
Gelman said the training that followed 9/11 can be either mundane or heart-wrenching for students, and should be based on critical thinking skills and exercises rather than routine tasks. Overall, it’s important to remain alert and on guard, she said.
“I think it was a very eye-awakening day. Just like the shooting at MSD, it’s reality,” she said, “that it can happen to us.”
DEBUNKING MYTHS AT TURNER TECH
Bradley Sultz taught 11th and 12th grade at William H. Turner Technical Arts High School in North Miami-Dade on the day of the terrorist attacks, he said.
Along with a wave of patriotism in support of the rescue efforts came a tsunami of hostility and suspicion about the faith and actions of American Muslims. Sultz used this as a teachable moment to debunk myths that all Muslims are terrorists and other misconceptions surrounding Islam and 9/11.
Sultz, now a social studies teacher at iPrep Academy near downtown Miami, said his ninth-graders were not alive to witness the terrorist attack and have become insensitive to the prevalence of mass shootings. In Florida alone, there were 15 mass shootings in 2019 and 34 in 2020. Nationally, mass shootings increased by 50% amid the pandemic, according to a USA Today article.
“More people died in the last two days of COVID in this country than in 9/11 and they’re shocked about that,” Sultz said. “I’m not trying to downplay it by any means. It’s horrible what happened. Sometimes, we become numb to things because it happened over and over.”
Antonio White, United Teachers of Dade vice president, said although training and drills can help prepare for attacks, they further normalize traumatic experiences for kids.
White said churches and schools, for example, contain defenseless people and have become targets for terrorism. In 2015, a white supremacist killed nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and two middle school boys were arrested Thursday over the plotting of a Columbine-styled mass shooting in Lee County, deputies say.
“We understand now that when people really want to hurt a country, or hurt somebody in particular, they go where the most vulnerable people are,” White said.
AT NORTHWESTERN HIGH
As Dannielle Boyer teaches her eighth-period ESOL class Monday, a Wonder Woman face mask muffles her voice as she defines resilience for her 19 students: the strength to overcome any obstacle. You need resilience to immigrate to the United States and to learn a new language, she said, as she walks in and out of the classroom aisles.
Entering her third year of teaching at Miami Northwestern High School, she said she’s required to lock her door during drills, keep students away from windows and huddle in the hard corner, a designated space near her desk in case of an emergency.
Ultimately, the responsibility of security moves into the hands of educators like herself.
“Anything is possible nowadays, but I got to protect myself, I got to protect my kids, I got to protect my students,” she said. “They got to go back home to their families. They got to be safe.”