Twenty-five years ago this week, more than 6,000 children were in seven public schools in lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center was attacked. Every student, teacher, and staff member made it home. That fact remains one of the quieter miracles of September 11, 2001.
In 2002, the American Public Health Association and Healthy Schools Network published Schools of Ground Zero: Early Lessons Learned in Children’s Environmental Health, researched and written by journalist Sarah Bartlett and her architect husband John Petrarca—parents whose own children were at nearby PS 234 that morning. Healthy Schools Network commissioned the report in fall 2001 after its office received incoming questions and complaints from parents. The report remains a unique, detailed first-hand account of what happened inside schools on the day of the attacks and in the months that followed. It’s a document that still speaks directly to anyone who cares about healthy children and healthy schools.
“When parents send their kids to school, they deserve to know that their children are safe. The aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, during which New York schoolchildren were exposed to life-threatening toxins after returning to schools in the Impact Zone, showed that we must do more to protect children, families, and teachers following a crisis.
The development of comprehensive, practiced emergency preparedness plans that address environmental health hazards is critical to this effort. I’m also calling on NIOSH to conduct a study on the long-term health of the children who lived and attended schools in the Impact Zone in the wake of 9/11 so that impacted New Yorkers can get the healthcare that they need.”
– US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
This is impactful work. Read what these supporters have to say about the importance of this report:
- Sarah Bartlett, Journalist, Co-Author, Schools of Ground Zero
- Kit Kennedy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Former Board President, Healthy Schools Network
- Georges C. Benjamin, MD, Executive Director, American Public HealthAssociation
- Claire L. Barnett, Founder and Former Executive Director, Healthy Schools Network
The morning of September 11
Four elementary schools sat four to six blocks north of the North Tower. Three high schools stood even closer—two only about 150 feet south of the South Tower. Stuyvesant High School, five blocks north, also housed 27 special-needs students, many in wheelchairs.
When the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m., elementary schools were still in morning drop-off. Many young children left immediately with parents. High school classes had already begun. After the second plane struck, principals of the two southern high schools decided on their own to evacuate toward Battery Park. Schools farther north waited longer, often in consultation with Board of Education offices miles away that could not see what principals saw from their windows.
When the towers fell, thousands of students were still close enough to be engulfed in the dust cloud. A parent survey later found that 40 percent of elementary families believed their children had been exposed. Communication failed in both directions: parents could not reach schools, schools could not reliably reach parents or the media, and official hotlines continued telling families their children were still inside buildings that had already been emptied.
New York’s SAVE Act required every school to have an emergency plan by July 2001. Most of those plans were lengthy forms that listed nearby buildings including, in one case, the World Trade Center itself. Few identified distant relocation sites. Few staff had internalized the plans. Public-address systems failed in some buildings. Special-needs students received little systematic attention.
The children survived because of the courage of teachers, principals, paraprofessionals, and passing strangers. The systems that were supposed to protect them were not in place or not rehearsed.
After the dust settled
The second half of the story is less often told. When the schools were asked to reopen two weeks after the attack, parents and teachers confronted a different problem: What, exactly, was “safe” for children if Wall Street traders were not going back to their offices downtown?
Dust from the collapse contained asbestos, lead, fiberglass, dioxins, mercury, and other contaminants. Testing protocols were inconsistent. Government agencies often measured only larger particles or single contaminants against adult occupational standards. Early on, US EPA said the “air was safe to breathe”. Doctors noted that even if each pollutant separately fell below a threshold, no one could say what the mixture would do to developing lungs. Children breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults are still in their developing years, and more vulnerable to the effects of pollutants than adults.
Outcomes varied school by school. Active, well-organized parent associations with websites, independent environmental consultants, and the willingness to use media and political pressure secured more thorough cleanings, better filters, and delayed re-occupancy. Schools with quieter parent bodies received less. Stuyvesant, used in part as a command center. Since its north wall was just 60 feet from the site where huge dump trucks loaded smoldering debris onto barges it became a particular flashpoint. Parents discovered that promises about ventilation, cleaning, and testing were not always kept. But no ventilation system could have managed the particulates and fumes from the barge loading area.
The report’s authors put it plainly: there was no system at any level of government whose job it was to protect children’s environmental health in schools.
Lessons that still matter
Schools of Ground Zero lists 31 lessons. We highlight several urgent items below:
- Principals need authority to evacuate based on what they see, not what a distant office decides.
- Emergency plans must be short, be practiced, and include distant sites and special-needs students.
- Families need their own communication plans for staying in touch during emergencies.
- Schools need ways to account for every child after an evacuation.
- Indoor air quality standards written for adults are not adequate for children. Urban schools need better filtration as a baseline, not only after a disaster.
- Parents cannot assume public agencies will automatically put children’s health first. Organized parent associations, independent experts, and transparency matter.
- Maintenance work that generates dust should not happen while children are in the building.
Claire Barnett, then executive director of Healthy Schools Network, wrote in her foreword that 9/11 threw every issue in children’s environmental health into high relief. Schools are not little offices. Children are not little adults. Twenty-five years later, the US still lacks comprehensive, child-specific standards for indoor environmental quality in schools and a public health system willing and able to intervene when children are at risk or have suspected exposures at school.
Why this report belongs in the 25th anniversary conversation
Anniversaries tend to focus on the Towers, the first responders, and the national security response. Schools of Ground Zero reminds us that thousands of children were also walking through dust, waiting for parents who could not reach them, then spending months in temporary classrooms while adults argued about air tests.
The report documents both extraordinary individual courage and systemic failure. It shows how parent advocacy can force better outcomes, and how uneven that advocacy can be. It argues that disaster preparedness and everyday environmental health in schools are the same conversation.
Those 6,000 children are now adults. Some of them still live with questions about what they breathed that day and, in the months, afterward. The buildings they returned to sit in a city that continues to renovate, construct, and sometimes neglect its school infrastructure.
The core claim of the 2002 report has not expired: protecting children’s health at school requires planning before the emergency, standards written for children rather than adults, public health agencies ready to help children, and parents who refuse to be spectators.
As we mark 25 years, the most useful tribute may be to treat Schools of Ground Zero not as a historical artifact but as a working document. The next emergency—whether it is another attack, a chemical release, wildfire smoke, or a pandemic—will again test whether we have learned what those seven schools taught us in 2001 and 2002.
Healthy schools. Healthy kids. That work is unfinished.
Schools of Ground Zero: Early Lessons Learned in Children’s Environmental Health (2002) was a joint publication of the American Public Health Association and Healthy Schools Network. The full report remains a primary source for anyone working on school emergency planning or children’s environmental health.
Additional Resources:
Ground Zero Parents in Their Own Words: Practical Advice to Schools and Parents. Healthy Schools Network, 2002, 2005
Survey of parents’ responses in spring 2002: 8 pp, highlights the advice from parents of children that attended Ground Zero Schools.
