BALDWIN, N.Y. — While former presidents and survivors gathered to hear songs and speeches commemorating 9/11 on Friday, teens at Baldwin High School about 30 miles from Ground Zero leafed gently through a stack of old letters.
Many of the messages were handwritten on 25-year-old lined notebook paper. Some had been written in cursive, a script almost indecipherable to several of the readers, who are from a generation that learned how to write essays with a keyboard.
One of the letters said the air in the Long Island community smelled “acrid” after the planes struck. Another writer described wanting to vomit.
And another said he was worried about his mom.
“September 11th was one of the scariest days of my life because my mother worked in Manhattan at the time,” the boy wrote in 2002. “Later on that day, I heard from her and she was fine, but when she came home she had dust all over her, from when the buildings fell.”
In handwritten letters and drawings, former students offered first-person accounts of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York. The records felt and read differently than the primary sources that today’s students at Baldwin High School normally encounter. These were the memories, fears and fury expressed by people who were their age when the unthinkable happened.
“For the most part, I think that, as high school students, we see 9/11 as an event in a textbook or a piece of history,” said Ethan Manay, 15. “But they were experiencing it.”
In Baldwin, a middle-class suburb of New York City, everyone had some connection to the attacks. Students and teachers lost parents, relatives and friends.
But the students sitting in John Buglione’s AP U.S. History class on Friday don’t have those same ties. They weren’t alive. Some of their parents weren’t even living in the country.
Buglione was in his second year of teaching when two planes plowed into the World Trade Center. He remembers watching from the school’s windows as plumes of smoke reached into the sky in the distance; playing the local radio from his boom box and hearing a desperate plea for “anybody with medical experience” to come to Manhattan; getting called to work early on Sept. 12 to find out which of his students’ parents were still missing.
“Everybody knew at the time how big an event it was,” said Buglione, now in his 27th year of teaching at Baldwin.
He also knew that one day he would stare at a classroom full of teenagers who would have no recollection of how teachers at Baldwin lined up to donate blood or, in the weeks that followed, how silent students would get when a plane flew overhead.
So, each semester between fall 2001 and spring 2003, Buglione asked his students to write a letter about 9/11 to the future students of Baldwin.
“‘Hey guys, we’re studying history. You’re doing history,’” he remembers telling them.
Then he stowed the messages in his classroom’s closet for more than a decade.
Around 2014, Buglione started getting students who were only a few years old when 9/11 happened. They vaguely recalled being confused or getting picked up early from school. He knew then that it was time to pull out the letters to help him teach a new generation.
“They don’t have that personal connection at all, the way that we know about Pearl Harbor, but we don’t have a personal connection to Pearl Harbor,” he said.
On Friday, a new crop of Buglione’s students got their turn to pore through the letters. As many Americans watched the commemorations on TV, read articles or listened to lectures, they held pieces of history in their hands.
In groups of three or four, students read the documents aloud to each other or silently to themselves. “This is sad,” said Alyssa Clay, 16. The room began to buzz as they noticed patterns in the dozens of letters.
“There’s a lot of flags,” one boy said as he collected a short stack of drawings covered in red, white and blue.
Another student jotted down a few notes. “Everybody pitched in,” he wrote.
“They definitely have a certain reverence for [the letters],” Buglione said. “It’s not always easy to get teenagers engaged in anything other than their own immediate experiences.”
In the letters, the millennial teens described feeling patriotic and how the nation united after the attacks. More than a few recounted feeling scared and helpless.
“In mere seconds, SECONDS, skyscrapers disappeared from their cloudy homes,” one of the former students wrote, remembering watching the carnage on TV. “That means that from my couch I was watching the gruesome demise of human beings, fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, brothers, sisters, best friends, husbands, wives. … And there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.”
Some vowed to live differently — to join the military or spend more time with their parents.
“Every one of them knew it was a turning point; it was a moment they had to change something,” Buglione said.
Ian Holmes, 16, saw grief and anger in the letters.
“You can see a lot of confusion. And with fear and anger, that goes to create a lot of blame,” he said. “There were accounts of Arab people and Muslims being dragged out to the street and beaten up by New Yorkers. That was one in one of the letters.”
It reminded Manay, who is Asian, of the wave of anti-Asian hate that grew out of the coronavirus pandemic, a more recent time when some people were scared and hunting for someone or something to blame.
“I remember seeing it on TV a lot, back in 2021, 2022, hate crimes in the city against Asian people, people facing violence, getting pushed on the train tracks,” he said. “That made me kind of scared.”
Sophia Vanterpool, 16, also drew a connection to the pandemic, the catastrophe that has defined her generation.
She noted how the nation came together — much like it did after 9/11 — to clap for health care workers or to coordinate food deliveries for vulnerable people.
“Through the hard times, there’s still solidarity between people,” she said.
One day, they understood, there will be students who won’t recall the pandemic, just like they can’t recall 9/11.
Elsewhere in the country, what students learn about 9/11 is shaped largely by where they attend school. Half of states require or expect schools to teach about the event, while about a dozen suggest some kind of instruction, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.
Teachers have had to change their lessons over the years to help students connect to the history, said Joe Schmidt, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, which represents social studies teachers.
And, depending on the teacher’s age, they might not have a personal link either. About 14 percent of public school teachers are under 30, according to the most recent federal data.
Still, teachers can tie the aftermath of the attacks to modern airport safety protocols or prompt students to think about the contributions of first responders.
“Educators across the country are like, I can translate this for my students — into [a] day of service, into celebrating firefighters, into understanding how we came together as a country” or the Islamophobia that followed the attacks, Schmidt said.
At George Washington Intermediate, in a school district that neighbors Baldwin, students covered the front lawn of the campus with small American flags, said Jessica Rivera, the school’s principal.
Rivera was in Buglione’s class in the aftermath of the attacks. In the letter she wrote as a senior, she promised to spend more time with family — a promise she continues to make good on, she said.
“We didn’t know the historical impact and political impact that that was going to have at the time. Being a teenager, you’re kind of in your own world,” she said. “9/11 was a turning point.”
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