With the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, many upperclassmen and teachers at McCallum have made the connection that this year’s freshmen will be the first class at McCallum with students that were not alive on Sept. 11, 2001. Though most students currently at McCallum were too young to remember that day, teachers who held classes on campus during the disaster can describe that mournful time with great detail. To get an inside look on what happened at McCallum on 9/11, the Shield asked four teachers to recount their experiences that day.

Richard Cowles: “I believe I was teaching an Algebra 1 class. After we heard the news, it was very somber, very surreal in terms that it was very far away, and we could tell it was significant, but there was no physical thing to grab a hold of. I think at some point in time Mr. Garrison made an announcement and said, ‘This has happened, and if you need help the counselors are available,’ I remember feeling sadness for the families with loved ones in New York. Sadness knowing that conflict was going to result because of this event. Sadness also knowing that, you know, people were going to associate an entire religious group with a decision even though it was clearly just a radicalist decision.”

Richard Whisennand: “I was in the same room that I teach in today when it happened. That was back when there was Channel One News. I turned on the TV and watched some of the coverage, but by that time the first tower was already hit. I can’t remember what class I was teaching, but we kept watching the news and then we saw the second one hit while we were in this room. It was just really jaw dropping. There was nothing but silence and disbelief. And lots of anger, too. People suddenly realized that this was an attack, not an accident. And when the towers pancaked, it was just unreal. It was hard to believe that. That’s when everyone realized how well engineered this assault was. It was well-thought out, well-planned. Students were sad, upset. And I think the realization hit everyone that this was the first time the United States of America had actually been assaulted on our own continental soil.”

Diana Adamson: “Well first of all it was weird because I went on my way to McCallum in the morning, dropped my son off at day care, and when I had the radio on I heard that they were talking about a plane that had flown into the World Trade Center. And I was like, ‘God, what a weird accident’. So I got to school, and everyone was talking about how strange it all was. No one really knew what was going on. So I remember first period in particular was so weird that day. I think the second tower was hit by then. This was in the day before cellphones were really popular, and I had a student who’s dad was working in New York at the World Trade Center. And she was totally freaked out. She asked if she could call her dad, and I said of course. So that day it was one of those things where there was no way people were having class, like you just couldn’t, so we wanted to watch the news but my classroom in the portables had no working TV. So I took my students into my friend’s classroom. He had a radio, so we all just sat there, his class and my class, and we sat together in a big circle and held hands with each other and listened to what was going on. It was so strange. So surreal.”

Rhonda Moore: “I went to the office before school to check my mailbox. Ms. Adamson was there, and she asked me if I had heard a plane had crashed into the World Towers. I hadn’t, so I went back to my room and turned on the television. It stayed on the rest of the day. It was horrifying to watch, but I wanted the television on because as a journalism teacher, I knew how important it was for my students to witness history, no matter how terrible it is. I remember standing in my room at one point, looking up at the TV, and I said, ‘Is that building starting to fall? That building can’t be falling.’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing was real. Then the second building fell. It was like watching an action movie, but there was no happy ending. After I got home, I started thinking about the paper coming out on Friday with nothing about the events of that day. It just didn’t seem right. The next day, I talked it over with my staff. They agreed with me. We decided the easiest thing to do without starting from scratch was to take the photo essay off the back page and fill the page with coverage of 9/11. I called the printer and told her we would be sending a new back page. Then my staff got to work. I don’t remember how they did it all, but we had a new page to the printer by the end of the day. My editor, Becca Eden, wrote the story for the page. She did a great job to pull that story and the rest of the page together. I was so proud to see them all work together as real journalists to get the job done. It was only my second year at McCallum.”