school ties

 September 11, 2001 shattered my sense of how safe and predictable the world was. But amid the horror, I wanted my students to understand that when the world feels frightening, we can still choose connection. We wrote letters of friendship and support to schools near the attacks, and every school wrote back. Twenty-five years later, I still remember that lesson: we may be powerless to stop tragedy, but we are never powerless to reach toward one another.