Editor's Note: As we approach the anniversary of the devastating attacks on The World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September11, George P. Davison, head of Grace Church School in lower Manhattan, reflects on events at his school following the attacks. Grace Church School, on Fourth Avenue and 10^th Street, is located a short distance from the site of the former World Trade Center. Along with dealing with the loss of parents and the logistics of keeping a school open in a shattered corner of the city, the Grace Church community found time to feed rescue workers, perform for the local firehouse, create art for the Javits Center (the base of operation for the relief efforts), and act as a conduit for schoolchildren around the world offering support for the rescue workers. The students and faculty also found themselves on the receiving end of an impressive outpouring of support from schools at home and abroad.

Day One

The story of the 2001-2002 school year began not at the first faculty meeting in August but on the second Tuesday of the month, which was also the fifth day of school. Each Tuesday, I have a 7:45 a.m. meeting with the chair of my board of trustees. He was new this year, so this was his first regular meeting as board chair. We had an enthusiastic talk about the new school year and then I took him on a tour of the dance and drama studio, which had been built that summer.

We arrived in the front hall of the school at about 8:45 a.m. The receptionist gave me the "Hysterical Mom" signal and I headed to my office to field the call. The "mom" began with a tearful apology. She said that she had tried to get her husband, but he had not as yet arrived at work, so she had to call me. She then began to explain what had just happened over her head. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. People were falling to the street. Being a skeptic, I immediately went to the Internet and tried to verify her story. The headline on CNN.com was "Bush to Visit Schools." I crossed the hall to the development office (in case anyone ever doubted it, the fund-raisers do have all the best equipment) and asked them to see what they could find. Soon pictures of a flaming North Tower and the voices of WNYC filled the room — and we all knew for sure that it was real.

Within seconds, the first parents came into the building. Everyone who had headed south after drop-off had a full view of both planes. One mother was hysterical about her husband who worked in the towers. A father who had been at his gym on the stationary bike looking out the window facing south wanted to help. Most people wanted their children.

When the second collision was confirmed, I called all the senior administrators together. We got the biggest maintenance guys and put them at the base of each stairway. The assistant head and I went classroom to classroom, pulling out teachers to tell them what had happened, and instructing them to attend a special assembly with their classes. At 9:20 a.m., we met with the older students and explained what had happened. The eighth graders exclaimed almost as one, "That was the plane!"— in the early stages of their English class, they had all seen a very large commercial airliner fly over the school at an extremely low altitude. We told them that we would allow them to call home in groups. I did not notice at the time, but kids told me afterwards, that there were several students whose parents work in the World Trade Center and that the students' friends went to them immediately.

By the time we assembled the younger students at approximately 10 a.m., things had begun to change for the worse. Before that assembly, I went out on a south-facing fire escape for air. What a beautiful day to the north! All I saw behind the building to our south was smoke. I also saw the vanguard of a silent dusty army of people retreating north. That army would swarm around our building for hours to come.

At the assembly for the lower school, we tried to cheer as well as inform the kids. The Priest-in-Charge of Grace Church had offered to put up for the night any child who was not picked up (the Rectory can sleep 29.) We told them that we might even have a sleepover party at the school if anyone's parents could not pick them up. We did our best to convey how serious this was, but also that life was going to go on and that school was going to go on and that we were all safe.

Despite our brave words, we did not know whether any of us were safe. The subways had stopped and the absence of the familiar rumble was eerie. The sirens stopped, too, when the North Tower went down. Internet access and nine of our 12 phone lines also left us by 10:30 a.m. That same father who had been riding his bike came to me in the lobby and said he thought we should evacuate.

I looked him in the eye and said, "If something else is going to happen either we cannot get far enough away or it will happen in the street, so we stay here."

The recovery began that morning and came about both by accident and design. The administrative team had instinctively set a mechanism for the orderly dismissal of the children. Volunteer parents arrived to help us do exactly that. As parents arrived, their children were brought down and handed directly to them, and both were signed out at the door.

The lobby of the school was an oasis of calm. The news that we would stay until every child was accounted for and with someone — even if it meant spending the night — spread among the parents and had a more profound impact than I had ever anticipated. The faculty did not flinch. They stayed in their classes. They taught. Not one teacher asked for coverage and a few who were finished for the day asked if they should stay. Our community is small. People walked out of the school feeling that it was the one safe place in town: safe for them and safe for others.

At about noon, I was able to leave the building to go get my son who was in a school about a mile to the north. I felt the same powerful urge the other parents did. I needed to have him with me if something else were to happen in the city. Walking back into the smoke with him, against the flow of humanity — some dusty, all looking dazed — was an otherworldly experience. I felt better to have him at my side. He was stunned by the difference that a mile made. (The next mile was even more stunning.)

We scheduled a chapel service for 1:20 p.m., both because we needed spiritual strength and as a means of determining exactly who was still with us and what that might mean. As I put on my blazer to go into the church, I realized that I had never loosened my tie while I climbed through the building that morning. Chapel was our first chance to cry. Everyone who was still there went into the church. We sang "Amazing Grace" and "America." The division heads made notes on which children were still present. The chaplain prayed for all of us. I gave a homily. I have no recollection of what I said, but, afterwards, people came up to me and said, "Thank you." We all felt better because we felt affirmed as a community in God's care. Outside the northward exodus continued. Volunteers in the church's garden on Broadway handed out 5,000 cups of water.

After chapel, we cross-referenced the list of remaining children. We still had about 150 of our 400 students. We had decided not to open school the next day and our parent volunteers were calling the class parents to spread the word. We worked our remaining lines to reach every family to make sure that each child would be picked up or could stay with others. Fifteen percent of our students live in the outer boroughs, and Manhattan was sealed off. Word got through that the outbound subways were beginning to run. A teacher volunteered to go to Union Square to check. When she returned with the news that the "L" train was running, we gathered our Brooklyn teachers and children together and they went off in a group. Miraculously, by 5:00 p.m. only the child of a surgeon from Downtown Hospital was left. The surgeon had called earlier and we knew she would arrive any moment. She came on schedule. We could go home.

Day Two

September 12 was an unreal day in New York. In fact, it was actually two radically different days depending on where you were. South of 14^th Street it was smoky. The National Guard had moved in. North of 14^th Street it was a quiet weekend-like day. There was sparkling sunshine and a huge white billowy cloud to the south. The quiet was broken only by the crackling sound of F-16 fighters overhead. By morning it was clear that we had lost three parents. One teacher lost a nephew and a few lost friends. Of course, that was too many, but we had feared many more, so, somewhat perversely, we counted that as a blessing.

The question at hand was whether we should re-open school on Thursday. Through the very balky phone system, I was able to talk with the Parent Association leadership, the assistant head, and the school psychologist. We all agreed that the best thing to do was to re-open. If there were no school on Thursday, parents would take the opportunity to leave the city. Downtown was smoky and unhealthy. People were afraid. We all felt that we needed to get the community together and begin a return to normalcy.

I was able to reach the then-president designate of NYU, who is one of our parents, on the phone. He said NYU was going to open. I talked with David Rider, the Priest-in-Charge of Grace Church, and he agreed that we could have a special chapel service at 9:00 a.m. We decided to go forward and we started the calling tree to inform parents that we would be open. At about 3 p.m., New York's mayor threw us a curve. He decided to re-open all schools except those below 14^th Street. He put pressure on NYU to stay closed. I could not get through to the Parent Association Chairs, but I had someone from the president's office at NYU walk over to their apartment to get them to try to call me. We talked again and again decided that the best thing for the kids and the community was to open. We organized school personnel to be at the checkpoints to identify students to the guardsmen. We agreed to have the division heads, psychologists, and the chaplain meet in my office at 7:30 a.m. to develop our strategy for the day, and for the psychologists to remain at the school all day and to lead the after-school faculty meeting.

Late in the afternoon the wind changed direction. It had been coming out of the northwest and it shifted to a southerly breeze. The smoke blew north and engulfed all of Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx that had previously been crystal clear. This had a panicking effect on many people, especially our teachers who lived outside of the neighborhood. From the West Side to Williamsburg there was worry about even going outside. The idea of going to work seemed impossible to many. The division heads fielded the calls and reported the concern to me. No teacher said, "No, I won't come," though many said, "Please reconsider." When the division heads relayed my determination to go forward, my phone started to ring. Thank goodness the phone system was so stretched. It kept the volume of calls down. Nevertheless, each time the phone rang I was filled with dread. I took my dog for a walk at about 11 p.m. and smelled a fresh northwest wind. I said a quick prayer for the continuation of this fair breeze.

Day Three

The wind held, and Thursday, September 13, was another gorgeous day. We pulled our group together and our recovery theme came in the first few seconds. The word was "Safety." We were going to talk and build activities around feeling safe in your family, in your neighborhood, in your school, in the city, in the nation, and on the planet. We agreed that we should find ways to get all of the children actively involved in helping the healing, while, at the same time, maintain all of the routines of school. The Chapel talk that morning would be twin homilies — one by the chaplain to talk of how we feel, and one by me to set out the theme and talk about the future. The division heads spread the word among the faculty that they should listen to my talk for the theme to use with the students. They were also told to teach their lessons, but to let the kids talk. I also gave orders to the maintenance staff to make sure that all the windows were tightly closed and the all of the AC units were using only internal air.

Families poured into school. The kids from north of 14^th Street loved going through the barricades. The sight of National Guardsmen, in full battle gear ushering small children in school uniforms through, while holding back the rest of humanity, was breathtaking. The hugging and tears of the parents was equally moving. When 9:00 a.m. came and the children filed into the church, it was full. Over 75 percent of our families came to school, and each child seemed to have at least one parent at the service. That second Chapel service was a moment when we felt we were taking back control of our lives. The first step to safety is a sense of controlling your life. We were together, we had a purpose, and we would move forward to build a strong and safe community.

Keeping the School Healthy

Our next challenge: how do we help people allay their fears even as we feel them ourselves? Every teacher was, at some level, shaken. When families left New York that first weekend, how many would stay in "the country" and how many would return? Thursday and Friday, September 13 and 14, about 80 percent of the students were in school, which I thought was an excellent number. My hope was that the number would go up on Monday. I was holding my breath. Schools need a critical mass of kids to be effective.

New Yorkers largely come from somewhere else. In our school, the most common other place is the suburbs — either those that surround this city or a suburb of another city. The leafy suburb represents the safety of home and many parents were feeling a powerful urge to return home. My task was to make sure that the school continued to seem as safe a place as that idealized vision of home. That required acknowledging fears, acting on some, and gently persuading parents that others were unreasonable.

The shock that we all felt was so great that we were convinced that something else was bound to happen. The unthinkable had happened and, therefore, nothing, no matter how fanciful, could be written off. Was our school on the top of Bin Laden's list to the point that a terrorist might sneak in the building? No. Was hiring a security guard a worthwhile investment? Yes. It made people feel safer, and if that made one family stay at Grace, then it was worth doing. (Actually, we probably should have had tighter security all along and we are going to keep the guard. He has made the drop-off of children from cars and busses more orderly and much safer.)

What made people feel safe was the notion that we had a plan and we acted according to that plan. We had already established a safe haven in case we had to evacuate the building and wait for a long period. (We had had an arrangement with The Cooper Union  — the college two blocks away — that dated to the Gulf War, but we joked that the two institutions had been neighbors for over a century and the arrangement could just as easily have dated to the Spanish American War.) However, when a parent asked what we would do if we could not go two blocks south, we made an arrangement with Friends Seminary, an independent school seven blocks north. If it made that parent feel better, then it was in keeping with our plan to make the kids and families feel safe in their neighborhood.

There were occasions when there were no easy answers, and, no matter what the decision, someone would be unhappy. In those cases we opted to do what we would have done under normal circumstances, because by being normal, and doing normal things, the kids felt safer. We had been scheduled to send the third grade on a field trip up the Hudson on the Sloop Clearwater. The trip had been designed to leave from Chelsea Piers on 17^th Street, but on September 20 those piers were still a staging area for the recovery effort. Now the boat was leaving from New Jersey. Most parents were supportive of the trip, but some worried that if something happened and the bridges and tunnels closed again, the children would be stranded on the other side of the river. The trip went on as planned. We equipped the teachers with cell phones and the phone numbers of several independent schools on the other side of the Hudson so if anything did happen they had a safe place to go. Other than the rain, the trip was a huge success. No one questioned a trip again until a terrorist alert in the spring named the Statue of Liberty as a target at a time that that same third grade was on its way to Ellis Island. (We went that time, too, and it did not rain.)

There were also issues about how we should be responding to the political climate of the city and the nation. New York was awash in American flags. New Yorkers joked that the rest of the country discovered that we were a part of the United States; I know from out-of-state friends that there were similar jokes that New Yorkers discovered that they were in fact Americans. We took down the school banner and hung an American flag from the pole over the door. A flag was placed in the dining room and flags drawn by children festooned the hallways of the school. Grace Church School has never said the Pledge of Allegiance on a daily or regular basis. Needless to say there was a great deal of pressure to change that practice. The unity of our community could have been imperiled by a dispute over the symbol of our national unity.

We decided to keep things the same, but to find several national symbols and use them as texts for the kids. We sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in Chapel one week and, later, after the troops went into Afghanistan, both verses of "The Star Spangled Banner." (The second verse includes the line: "If the cause is just then fight we must…") When the Federal Education Department asked all schools to join in a national synchronous pledge on the first Friday in October, we joined in because it was in keeping with our plan of connecting our students with others around the country to make them feel safe. Our holiday card was a photomontage of the flag with every student in the school holding a red, white or blue card. The Auction theme for the year was "The Spirit of 1776." Was everyone completely satisfied? No. Our more left-wing members complained about too much patriotism and our more right-wing members wanted something more regular, but everyone was comfortable because the school was responding consistently and appropriately.

People wanted desperately to feel normal again. We kept saying, "Everything has changed," but, deep down, people wanted as much as possible to be the same. By going on with life while acknowledging and responding to fears and concerns, we helped people feel that normalcy and safety could be found at school. Enrollment did drop, but by Columbus Day we were only missing eight students, which was 2 percent of the student body. The short-term threat to the viability of the school was over, so long as nothing else happened.

There were other moments when we needed to respond quickly to external events: Anthrax in the mail at a post office across the street meant sorting mail with gloves on; the sudden intrusion of emergency vehicles' sirens responding to a nearby scaffolding collapse required us to walk around the school building to explain the situation and restore calm.

By early October we began to feel confident that the school would hold together, and so all of our efforts could go toward helping the individual children and families deal with their sense of loss and grief.

Individual Healing

Five children, some currently enrolled and one recently graduated, had lost a parent, suddenly and without warning. All three families were intact, but the loss of a parent is a deep and abiding fear for children. Over thirty families were forced from their homes for some period of time. Home is the hub of daily life, with pets and toys, clothes and computers. There was no overlap between those who were homeless and those who lost a parent, but it also meant that everyone of every age had a friend who was directly affected and was thinking about who would be next.

The response of giving that we saw as a nation was mirrored among our families. People wanted to be active participants in the recovery. Families offered rooms and apartments to the displaced. A parent gave a staff member a vacant apartment for three months for free. (The staff member could not convince his wife to return to Battery Park City even after his building was reopened, and, therefore, could not get money for rent from FEMA.) The school lent laptop computers to students whose computers were locked in apartments across the street from Ground Zero. One family just needed a few folding chairs to be able to sit and eat in the unfurnished apartment that another parent had lent the family.

Hundreds of children and families were physically unaffected, but were touched emotionally. Posttraumatic stress syndrome is a widely studied phenomenon. The psychologists all told us that we needed to allow the children to express their feelings in a way that was comfortable for them, but we should be careful not to force them to express what we were feeling.

From the first meeting of the faculty on September 13, there was an agreement that we should be looking for ways to involve the students, faculty, and staff as directly as possible in the relief and recovery efforts. On Friday, September 14,^, all of the students in grades seven and eight spent the afternoon making sandwiches to help feed the many volunteers at Ground Zero who were sifting through the wreckage by hand. Several teachers organized the most vivid moment here: a night dedicated to folding 1,001 origami paper cranes for a girl whose mother had been killed. Originally planned for the students who had gone on a school trip to Japan the previous June and had visited Hiroshima, it quickly expanded to others and their parents. Fathers who were all thumbs sat next to young daughters who could fold like the wind and worked intently for hours. There was food and the buzz of purpose. The cranes were imperfect but numbered a thousand and one. Everyone there felt better for the evening.

A project that involved the whole school was a scroll designed to decorate a portion of the Javits Center, which had become the base of operations for the relief effort. It was laid out in the gym and each class had a designated time to work on it. Each child was given markers and encouraged to express what they were feeling. The expressions of hope, gratitude, fear, and anger were quite clear and articulate even in the works of the four-year-olds. Airplanes and burning towers were the most constant motif. A teacher videotaped the kids at work and a portion of the scroll for posterity, and then took the scroll to the Javits Center where it hung for a few weeks. (We held an evening meeting to explain to parents what we were doing and how it was working; showing that video allowed parents to see how positively engaged the students were.)

The local firehouses were devastated. Ladder 3 around the corner from the school lost 12 of its 25-man complement. The older kids wanted to go and sing to them, so they performed for Ladder 3 and for two other firehouses. The effect on the morale of the kids was huge. You could see it in the brightness of their eyes and the spring of their step.

The next surprise came with the restoration of our e-mail. Our T1 line ceased to function at about 10:30 a.m. on September 11 and did not come back into service for about eight days. However, our website is hosted in California so people all over the world looking for a school in Lower Manhattan found us and left us messages. Children of all ages from England, Australia, Italy, Canada