San Benito High School senior Katie White was four years old and in preschool when the World Trade Center Twin Towers came crashing down.
She doesn’t remember watching the news that fateful day more than a dozen years ago, but she was one of 15 students huddled in the school quad this morning from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. placing 3,000 tiny American flags in the shape of the iconic date: 9-11.
“I thought it was a good opportunity to do something with our school,” White said.
When the students left the grassy quad area to attend their morning classes, they left signs explaining that each flag in the design represents a person that died that day.
White is on the older side of high school students across the nation who have fuzzy memories of a date that is so memorable for their teachers, parents and grandparents.
This year’s flag memorial was put together by the campus’ Future Farmers of America, an agricultural education program run at middle and high schools. The students were inspired to build the memorial after their FFA advisor, Myndi Krafft, who previously taught at Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill, shared that her students at the former site had built different designs in memory of the historic date using American flags. When the students’ order of flags didn’t arrive on time, they made 3,000 American flags by hand from printed paper and wooden skewers.
While many of these students don’t have personal memories of the day the planes crashed, the school is still deeply connected to the event. The loss was personal for school employee Carol Heiderich.
The campus memorial included a framed photo of her brother, Jason Dahl, who was captain of Flight 93, the only one of the four hijacked planes that did not meet the target terrorists had mapped out. Because of the actions of the 40 passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 an attack on the U.S. Capitol was thwarted, according to the National Park Service’s website, which now recognizes the site of the plane’s crash in a rural field in Pennsylvania as a national memorial.
“I was so young, I just knew it was a big event that happened to a lot of people,” White said.
As she moved through classes today and heard students reflect on the memorial during lunch time, she heard at least one student say they didn’t realize how big of an event 9-11 was until they came to school and heard teachers share memories, and saw the flags in the courtyard.
FFA advisor Kelly Bianchi was surprised to learn how little some of her pupils knew about a day that was so pivotal in American history but she was proud to see them work towards education and awareness in their school community.
“I was very proud of the kids – that they stepped forward and took on the challenge,” she said.
