09/11/2026
How teachers at the World Trade Center and Pentagon child-care centers safely evacuated the children in their charge. 🇺🇸💙
The 14 teachers at Children's Discovery Center in 5 World Trade Center, a building that later partly collapsed, had taken in only 42 early arrivals by the time the first plane hit that morning.
As the ground shook, teachers grabbed each child's emergency records, took babies in their arms and, following a drill they practiced every month, led the children outside, leaving behind their own purses and, in some cases, their own shoes, says Kristin Thomas, head of northeast operations for Knowledge Learning, the San Rafael, Calif., operator of the center.
Some parents raced in to pick up children, too, leaving staffers with just 28 kids.
Once outside, the ragtag band was barred by police from the preset evacuation destination, 7 World Trade. Then, the second plane hit. Split into two groups by flying debris and hordes of fleeing people, teachers began walking north. One group picked up several shopping carts from a grocery store and helped toddlers inside, telling them, "We're going for a little ride," Ms. Thomas says. Some passing businessmen tore off their white shirts to cover the children.
Some teachers, with babies propped on their hips, were soon barefoot; the paper booties they'd donned in the center's infant room had shredded from all the walking. Armed with the emergency records, staffers borrowed phones to get messages to parents. Both groups trekked more than a mile before coming to rest, one in a hospital and the second in a preschool. All the kids were returned safe to parents; in the preschool, many were napping on cots as parents arrived.
At the Pentagon, Shirley Allen, director of the Children's World Learning Center, had plenty to worry about after Flight 77 plowed into the building. Her husband, a naval officer, worked in an office directly in the path. But Ms. Allen, a 12-year child-care veteran, thought only of evacuating the 148 children in her center, located about 30 yards from the Pentagon. In a process also honed by monthly drills, she and her 36 staffers rounded up youngsters, put babies in mobile cribs and set out across a park.
Hundreds of panicky workers ran past the children. Rescue workers relocated Ms. Allen's group five times. Again and again, she had to demand loudly that security officers accompany the kids as they moved. Heart pounding, she fought fears that a child would be lost.
But with the children, she and the teachers, many of them equally experienced, kept calm. "The children were relaxed, because they looked into their teachers' faces and saw they were relaxed," Ms. Allen says. To distract them, teachers played pat-a-cake and sang "Eensy Weensy Spider."
It was three hours later, with the children safe and most of them back in parents care, that these brave teachers were finally able to turn their attention to their own families.
It takes a special person to be a teacher... and those of 9/11 protecting and getting the children to safety are truly amazing.💙❤️
