Middletown, New Jersey, is a tight-knit community of 67,000 people located along the Jersey Shore, a little over an hour’s drive from Manhattan.
On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City, and the world watched as the towers fell to the ground and thousands of people died — 37 of them from Middletown, second only to the number of people who died from New York.
The area schools handled the news differently. The high school students were made aware of the situation and some opted to drive home. Given how many people in town had ties to people who worked in the two buildings, educators chose not to tell students in the elementary and middle schools.
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Some of the children who grew up in Middletown and have memories of the sadness of the days and weeks that followed have now grown up and are educators at the same schools they attended.
In the fall of 2016, it’s likely that a freshman in high school was born after Sept. 11, 2001. Most children have no firsthand memories of the attack that hurt their town so deeply.
It is now up to the teachers who lived through the horrors to impart the legacy of those who died, and the tragedy and reality of the terrorist attack.
“They know what happened, they’re aware of terrorism, this cruel attack,” Thompson Middle School math teacher Cara Muratore told Rare.
Muratore was 11 years old during the terrorist attacks and now teaches in the same school that she attended on 9/11. Even though her students were born after the rubble had been cleared, they too have constant reminders of the tragedy.
“They didn’t live through it, but they know so much about it,” Muratore said.
This knowledge hit home for Muratore when a student told her that his father worked at the World Trade Center but had decided not to go to work that day.
“His next breath was ‘I would not be born right now … I would not be here,’ “Muratore said.
As a math teacher, Muratore must also deal with some uncomfortable moments whenever a math problem’s answer is 911.
“We get silence in the room,” Muratore said. “I tell them it’s just a number.”
Source: Educators With Unique Perspective Talk About Teaching 9/11 by Rare on Rumble
Cristina Fox — now a math teacher at Middletown High School South — was in the seventh grade on 9/11. She recalls that the main staircase at Bayshore Middle School was closed to students. The staircase was made of glass, and the school was close enough to the water that people could see the thick cloud of smoke rising over the Manhattan skyline.
Kevin Cullen is a Middletown native and graduate of Middletown schools, and he’s now a vice principal at Bayshore — the same school Fox attended. Throughout his career as a history teacher and administrator, he has had to field questions from students.
“Why would anybody do something like this?” Cullen says his students would ask. “It’s unfortunate that, as a teacher, you don’t have the answer to that question.”
Cullen always encourages discussion about the day and the town’s deep connection to it. He says that, each year, the line of questioning would take a different tone as the students became more removed from the tragedy.
“The longer I taught, the further removed so many students were from the events,” Cullen said. “I wouldn’t really allow for that to happen.”
Even eight or nine years later, “I made sure that we would address it in great detail so that the events were never forgotten and we made sure that we paid homage to those people.”
Middletown South guidance secretary Vickie Johnson was also born and raised in Middletown. In the past two decades, she has gotten to know thousands of names and faces of township students as they grow up.
When Johnson thinks back to that sunny Tuesday morning and how she watched the towers burn from across the bay, she marvels at how fast a living horror becomes a piece of history.
“It’s amazing how quickly you can just turn something into a page in a history book,” she said.
This is part of a personal, original Rare series reflecting on a national-turned-hometown tragedy. See the complete series and find full 9/11 anniversary coverage at on.rare.us/911.
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