On the grass at Pacoima Middle School Friday morning, nearly 200 American flags stood in row, each bearing names of 15 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The memorial had been assembled by students who were born years after the attacks. Nearby, students stopped to read brightly colored links in a paper “unity chain,” inscribed with messages about how they could make their school kinder and more unified.
Inside the library, students watched a video of Pacoima Middle School teachers recalling where they were on Sept. 11, 2001. The Pacoima Singers performed two songs, including one that Scott Mandel, who runs the school’s musical theater department, helped rewrite in response to the attacks 25 years ago. Students later observed a moment of silence and wrote thank-you notes to first responders.
For a generation with no firsthand memory of Sept. 11, the activities offered one way of learning about an event that has moved from lived experience into history.But exactly how Los Angeles Unified students learn about the attacks and their aftermath varies considerably.
A spokesperson for the district said Friday that Sept. 11 is addressed within modern and contemporary history, particularly in 10th-grade world history and 11th-grade U.S. history. But there is no standalone LAUSD-mandated 9/11 unit, no prescribed number of days teachers must spend on the subject and no requirement that they use a particular lesson or resource for the topic.
Instead, LAUSD provides curriculum maps, instructional guidance and supplemental resources while giving teachers and schools discretion over how they approach the subject. The district also encourages educators to use the anniversary as an opportunity for age-appropriate lessons — allowing students to encounter Sept. 11 even when their history classes have not yet chronologically reached 2001.
At Pacoima Middle School, that meant turning remembrance into something students could physically participate in.
Rachel Rodriguez, a seventh-grade science teacher who also teaches the school’s student leadership class, said her leadership students came up with the idea for both the unity chain and the flag memorial.
The original plan was to place flags on the lawn, Rodriguez said. The students then asked whether they could attach the victims’ names to them.
As Rodriguez prepared the names, she said, students began to understand the human scale of the attacks. Some entries included a victim alongside an unborn child.
“I really think that’s when it really hit the kids,” she said. “These are people who were just going to work, or got on a plane, they were mothers and fathers, and brothers and sisters.”
For students who weren’t alive on Sept. 11, Rodriguez said, seeing the names spread across the rows of flags helped create a connection to the victims, and a sense that they, too, had a responsibility to remember and honor them.
Rodriguez does not teach history, but each Sept. 11, she pauses her science class to tell students about her experience.
She was already teaching at Pacoima Middle School in 2001. She remembers arriving at work after the second plane hit the World Trade Center and trying to reassure frightened students who wondered whether Los Angeles could be next.
Now she encourages students to ask their parents and relatives what they remember.
What schools are expected to teach
California’s History-Social Science Framework explicitly discusses Sept. 11 in its section on teaching the contemporary world, placing the attacks in the broader context of the post-Cold War era.
LAUSD said students should examine not only what occurred but its historical context, causes and effects and consequences for the world that followed. The state framework asks students to consider how the attacks affected international relations and whether and how they changed the post-Cold War world.
The district’s Division of Instruction also shared with teachers a collection of Sept. 11 instructional resources provided by the California Department of Education. The list includes materials from PBS, the national September 11 Memorial & Museum, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the National Council for the Social Studies.
Those materials are supplemental, LAUSD said. Teachers are not required to use a particular lesson or activity.
David Tokofsky, a former LAUSD Board of Education member, said he views Sept. 11 as “a seminal and important date in U.S. history”, comparable in historical significance to Pearl Harbor, and said it should be discussed, analyzed and memorialized in schools in ways consistent with the district and state goals.
Tokofsky said he did not recall the Board of Education passing a specific motion on remembrance and teaching of Sept. 11, as it has done on other issues. He called that “unfortunate” and said the superintendent and senior staff should provide direction and assistance to schools and ensure instructional materials are available to students at appropriate developmental and instructional levels.
That flexibility can be significant because recent history comes in late in a chronologically organized U.S. history course.
Doug McDermott, a teacher and history department chair at Ulysses S. Grant High School, said Sept. 11 is “near the end of the history book.”
“So a lot of teachers don’t… get to it in their curriculum,” he said, adding that some make it only as far as the middle or late Cold War for U.S. history.
McDermott makes it a point of returning to the subject. On the anniversary, he typically takes about 15 minutes to tell students about experiencing the attacks on his second day as a teacher. Later in the course, he returns to Sept. 11 and its aftermath, connecting it to subjects including nativism, the Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-Muslim hate.
LAUSD, responding to questions about pacing, said teachers are expected to use curricular maps and instructional guidance to plan so students have opportunities to study modern and contemporary periods.
The goal, the district spokesperson said, is not simply to “get through” the textbook or a list of dates, but to prioritize essential content and help students understand connections between the past and present.
Danielle Mitchell, a Division Director III in Curriculum and Instructional Services at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, said Friday that Sept. 11 is not a standalone topic in California’s grade-level standards, but is addressed in the state’s broader history-social science framework. Local districts decide how to incorporate that guidance into their curriculum and pacing.
“There’s a lot of content to be taught,” she said.
That makes it important, she said, to find opportunities to integrate the attacks and their consequences into other parts of the curriculum, such as lessons on national security or governmental relations, rather than treating the subject as something extra teachers must fit in.
There are also “multiple entry points” for teaching about Sept. 11, she said. An educator might introduce it around the anniversary early in the school year and build upon that foundation when related subjects arise later.
For the 25th anniversary, LACOE shared information with local districts encouraging educators to consider the potential emotional impact of the attacks on students and to ensure instructional materials are developmentally and grade-level appropriate. It also directed teachers to resources from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
“The goal of history of social science instruction is broader than remembering an event or a date,” Mitchell said. Students should develop historical understanding, examine events in context, engage with credible sources and understand cause and consequence, she said.
An anniversary becomes a lesson
At Santee Education Complex, high school social studies teacher Dan Gordon uses the anniversary itself as an entry point, even though his 10th grade world history students are currently studying absolutism and the Enlightenment.
Gordon begins by asking students to list everything they associate with Sept. 11 and then everything they wonder about it. Students compare their questions in small groups and choose something they want answered.
Their questions have included who attacked the U.S. and why, where the attackers came from, how American life changed after Sept. 11 and how the U.S. responded.
One question particularly struck Gordon: Were the more than two decades of war that followed worth it?
Gordon gives students an overview of what happened to the four hijacked planes, and has them examine primary and secondary sources and accounts from victims.
He organizes the lesson around a broader question: Which democratic values were under attack on Sept. 11?
Those values, Gordon said, include freedom of speech and religion, women’s equality, representative government and checks and balances.
LAUSD Superintendent Andrés Chait told the SCNG Friday that the district provides age-appropriate resources so students can learn about Sept. 11, although what that looks like differs substantially between an elementary classroom and a middle or high school.
“We certainly encourage it,” Chait said of teaching or commemorating the attacks around the anniversary, “but we know that our teachers are going to make the most appropriate judgement for the students that they serve.”
Chait was a second-grade teacher when the attacks occurred. Speaking to Pacoima Middle School students Friday, Chait recalled the fear and uncertainty of that morning but told them what he remembers even more vividly was the unity that followed and the courage of first responders and ordinary people.
For students today, he compared learning about Sept. 11 to his own experience learning about Pearl Harbor.
“I certainly wasn’t alive for that,” Chait said. But learning about the event and “the actions that ordinary Americans took to step up in that moment,” he said, provided powerful lessons.
For eighth-graders Lulu Fry and Scarlett Spinney, learning about Sept. 11 has already happened in stages.
Fry said she first formally learned about it around sixth grade.
“Before they didn’t really talk about it,” Fry said. “I think they thought I wouldn’t understand it.” She said waiting until she was older helped her better understand what had happened.
Spinney recalled first encountering Sept. 11 when she was younger in elementary school but said she couldn’t fully process it then.
“But coming into middle school, our teachers talked to us more about it,” she said, “and I was able to understand more.”
Their lessons have included videos, books and discussions about the attacks and their consequences. But Friday’s commemoration also offered something a textbook could not: the recollections of adults who had lived through the day.
Spinney said she was struck by hearing adults describe how people responded amid the fear and uncertainty.
“Everyone was doing something different, but they all had hearts,” she said. “They all stopped to take a moment to realize what was happening in the world. They were scared, but they still cared.”
Fry said students their age should learn about Sept. 11 so they know “how to contribute, know how to help, know how to be there for people when they’re at their lowest.”