Responding to Terror

After the second plane struck the World Trade Center, Monica Adams heard her principal's voice over the P.A. "She announced that there had been a tragedy and asked teachers to turn their televisions on, because this was certainly history," says Adams, a media specialist at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, VA. Not long afterward, Adams's students had an even more pressing need for information: many of their parents worked at the Pentagon, which had just been struck by yet a third plane hijacked by terrorists. Students and faculty crowded into the media center to watch TV. "I saw these big hulky football players crying," says Adams. Others watched in total silence.

On Tuesday, September 11, school librarians around the nation had to cope not only with their own shock and fear at the terrorist attacks, but also with the need to calm panicky students, or, in the case of younger children, to try to shield them from the horrific news. The job was perhaps most difficult in and around the two sites of the attack, New York City and Washington, DC, where the terror had a direct effect on students and staff.

At Fairfax's Robinson Secondary, one girl lost her father in the Pentagon attack. At least two students at South Mountain Elementary School in Maplewood, NJ—a short commute from the World Trade Center—also lost a parent. Suzanne Ng, the school librarian, said that on the day of the attacks, her principal, like many elementary school principals, asked teachers to turn off all radios and TVs and not to discuss the attacks with children. Ng found herself trying to act calm for her students' sake even as she worried about her husband, who works in lower Manhattan.

In and around New York City, nervous parents started arriving almost immediately to pick up their kids. But because the city had sealed off many of the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, many parents could not reach their children, and schools had to scramble to make sure students had safe places to stay. At P.S. 3 in Greenwich Village, an elementary school not far from the Trade Center, some students witnessed the attacks from their classroom windows. "They were looking and saw the billowing smoke [from the first tower]. Then they saw the other airplane," says librarian Jacquelyn Peters. These children, fourth and fifth graders, were moved to the library "to give them some relief," Peters says.

Other children were not so lucky. Elementary students at P.S. 234 in lower Manhattan and at Stuyvesant High School, both in the shadow of the Trade Center, witnessed everything and had to evacuate their schools, marching north "like a column of refugees under police escort," reported the New York Times. Peters's school was one of the places that received these children, who then waited in the gym and auditorium until they could be picked up. Peters says the parents and staff at her school were the epitome of calm, and many stayed late to help with the children who couldn't get home. "It's amazing how all your professionalism kicks in," Peters says. "You can't deal with your own issues, it's just 'I gotta get through the day, keep these children safe, and keep these children calm.'"

New York City schools were closed on Wednesday, the day after the attack. By Thursday, when most schools reopened, teachers had met with psychologists and social workers to discuss how to deal with students—and with their own emotions—in the aftermath of the disaster. "The big fear was we'd break down in front of the kids," says Lisa Von Drasek, a librarian at Manhattan's Bank Street School, which is affiliated with the well-known college of education. Like others, Von Drasek and her colleagues talked about "modeling calm and control, being aware of our own feelings but not acting on them," and, perhaps most of all, "reassuring children that they're safe." That was not necessarily an easy task, since on Thursday, Manhattan faced roughly 90 bomb threats throughout the day, and some schools had to be evacuated.

Librarians, of course, had another weapon with which to combat terror: information. Almost immediately after the attacks, many had begun to compile lists of books and Web sites aimed at helping young people cope with tragedy and at countering anti-Arab sentiment. One resource list, compiled by the Association for Library Service to Children, is at www.ala.org/alsc/dealing_with_tragedy.html. As for the long-term effects of the violence, librarian Grace Oliff of Ann Blanche Smith Elementary School in Hillsdale, NJ, says: "I think it's too early to judge how our children are handling it. We need to be cautious and keep our eyes and ears open for quite a while."