Carmen Robles left her Battery Park City apartment on September 11, 2001, walked across the Williamsburg Bridge with her children, and did not return home until November. Twenty-five years later, she still lives in that same apartment, teaching history just blocks from the reflecting pools that now mark where the World Trade Center towers fell.
Robles is a history teacher whose approach to the classroom was permanently reshaped by what she lived through that day, according to Spectrum News NY1. On the morning of the attacks, she took a cab to teach high school students on the Lower East Side while her fifth-grade child attended a school just blocks from the World Trade Center. The station reports that her children were eventually reunited with her after being separated during the attacks, and the family stayed with relatives in Brooklyn until they were able to go home that November.
That personal history now anchors how Robles frames lessons for a student body that has no living memory of the event. As the station notes, 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, and Chalkbeat reports that about one million New York City children were in school on September 11, 2001, while some current teachers and parents were not born then, according to Chalkbeat. Robles has said her current students view September 11 as an event in a history book rather than something they experienced, which is precisely the gap she works to close.
From Personal Memory to Classroom Lesson
Robles teaches students alongside historical content, saying she teaches children as well as content, according to the station's report. Each September she shares her own September 11 story with students, and she has said their connection to that day should come through people rather than only textbooks. This year, she plans to ask students to interview someone who remembers September 11 directly.
That approach echoes a broader shift in how Lower Manhattan schools have grappled with the attacks since 2001. Elementary students at P.S. 89 in Battery Park City were evacuated during the attacks before parents and staff voted in January 2002 to return to the building on February 28, 2002, according to Gotham Gazette. Fires near Robles's home burned until approximately February, while removal of roughly 1.5 million to 2 million tons of toxic debris continued through May 2002, per the World Trade Center History archive.
Teaching Illness, Bias, and Consequence
Robles's lessons include coverage of 9/11-related illnesses and the Islamophobia that followed the attacks, connecting classroom history to consequences that outlasted the headlines. The federally funded World Trade Center Health Program now monitors more than 140,000 enrolled responders and civilian survivors, with medical researchers reporting a 75 percent increase in Northwell's certified cancer cases from 2023 to 2025 and a twofold increase in lung cancer over five years, according to Northwell Health. On the discrimination front, FBI statistics published in 2002 recorded 481 anti-Muslim hate crimes nationwide in 2001, a seventeen-fold increase from 28 recorded incidents in 2000, as documented by Human Rights Watch.
Robles draws similar connections in her World War II curriculum, asking middle school students to debate the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an event that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Her lessons on that period include radiation sickness and anti-Asian hate, urging students to consider the people involved and the lasting ramifications of historical events rather than treating them as fixed dates in a timeline.
A City Investing in Remembrance
New York City leaders and the City Council have backed that kind of instruction with resources. Ahead of the 25th anniversary, the City Council announced $1 million for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum to provide free student field trips, with a focus on eighth graders. New York State has also mandated the framework schools use each year: legislation enacted in 2019 established an annual September 11th Remembrance Day in public schools, requiring a brief moment of silence every September 11 to encourage classroom discussion, according to CBS News.
Nationally, at least 40 states expect or suggest that public schools address 9/11 through curriculum or observances, though policies vary widely and only a minority mandate specific statutory history lessons, per a survey reported by The Washington Post. That patchwork leaves substantial discretion to educators like Robles in deciding how to frame the human and social impact of the attacks for students a generation removed from them.
Other Lower Manhattan institutions are marking the anniversary with their own efforts to preserve firsthand memory. The Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund published a collection of 176 essays and recollections from survivors and family members timed to the 25th anniversary, a project Hoodline detailed in its coverage of the relief fund's 25-year legacy. Webcam operator EarthCam also released a 25th-anniversary time-lapse compiled from more than 14.7 million images captured continuously at Ground Zero since September 2001, offering visual documentation of the same rebuilding that now surrounds Robles's classroom.
