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Faraway tragedy too close to home
By ROBERT KING
© St. Petersburg Times, In the midst of a national tragedy that hit especially close to home at their school, Springstead High students Tony Hager and Trenten Szabo did something you don't always expect to see in a public school. They held a daylong prayer vigil. "I felt that the Lord wanted to come here and talk to the kids in need," said Hager, who met with a handful of kids at a crisis center set up in the school library. In schools around Hernando County, the news of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington produced lots of prayers Tuesday, more than a few tears and an abundance of worry. Despite the distractions, schools remained open Tuesday and will open again today. That doesn't mean things are business as usual. At Springstead, where many students have roots in New York, droves of kids left school early to huddle with family members and await news about relatives. By noon, more than 100 students had left -- five times the daily average. "I just don't understand how one person can wake up one day and say I'm going to kill as many Americans as I can," said Stefanie Hibbert, a Springstead senior who was in New York last month during a visit to family in the area. She and her classmates watched news coverage of history in the making, in lieu of other class work. At most schools, public or private, after-school activities were canceled, including the volleyball, golf and swimming competitions at the county's high schools. David Holtzhouse, the administrator at Hernando Christian Academy, summed it up this way: "It seemed to be a little frivolous to me to be out playing soccer when the rest of the nation was out mourning the loss of innocent lives." Springstead went so far as to tell its students to go home immediately after school. Eileen Elefante was a secretary in the World Trade Center complex during the 1993 bombing. Now she's a teacher's aide at Springstead. Her first thought Tuesday was for her sister Elizabeth, whose office was high in one of the Trade Center towers. Relief came this time when she heard her sister stayed home Tuesday after waking up sick. At Westside Elementary, where the TVs were purposely turned off to spare the younger children, parents streamed into the school to take their kids home early. "Everything went pretty much regular other than the front office being a swinging door all day," said assistant principal Charley Smith. At Fox Chapel Middle School, where perhaps half the student body has New York ties, administrators went classroom to classroom to deliver the news and talk about it with students. For most of the day, the TVs stayed on. With so many latchkey kids -- who go home to empty houses because their parents are working -- principal Dave Schoelles said he wanted to ensure that students had access to an adult to help them figure out what to make of the images on TV. "We felt it was important for kids to have information," Schoelles said. At several schools, the news hit very close to home. One Fox Chapel teacher has family living near the site where the jet crashed in Pennsylvania. She left class briefly to make sure they were safe, Schoelles said. One student has a brother working in the World Trade Center. At Hernando Christian, a private school of 365 students in Brooksville, several people scrambled to check on the safety of relatives working in or around the Trade Center. One student has a brother working in the Pentagon. At one point, Holtzhouse led the school in prayer via the public address system. "So far, all we've heard is good news," he said. In the school district office, personnel specialist Janice Piarulli spoke to her daughter in downtown Manhattan minutes before the attack. Her daughter Jordana, president of Central High School's senior class in 1999, was trying out her new cell phone. After the attack, Janice could not reach her daughter with the cell phone. Given that her daughter's school -- the Fashion Institute of Technology -- is just a couple of subway stops from the Trade Center, she began to worry. Finally, Jordana, a fashion merchandising student, called to report she was all right. She had been on a subway during the attack. She wasn't aware of the attack until after she emerged from a subway tunnel and saw smoke. "Oh, my God, it's crazy here," Jordana said in an interview with the Times. "I'm okay. It's just that there are a lot of people that are hysterical." - Times staff writer Robert King covers education in Hernando County and can be reached at 754-6127. Send e-mail to rking@sptimes.com.
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From today's Hernando Times |
