In St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Brooklyn, the adults who once lived through 9/11 are now teaching it to children who know it only as history. Kathleen Palladino, who was a kindergartner on Sept. 11, remembers classmates being called home over the school PA system, then walking with her mother and older sister past a darkened skyline toward Manhattan.
The memory never left her. Palladino recalled looking up and asking, “Mommy, why is the sky black?” and said the scene felt like “a dividing line.” Now she teaches nursery school at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where her students are 3 years old and the lessons have to stay simple. This week, as Americans mark 25 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the classroom is part of a wider shift: the children sitting on the rug were born into a world in which the attacks are already history.
That is the scale of the change at the school. Palladino is one of the educators there with a direct memory of that day, and Kathy Curatolo is another; Curatolo watched one of the towers collapse from a school roof and later learned that her youngest brother, Robert Curatolo, a 31-year-old FDNY firefighter, was underneath the tower when she saw it fall. Their memories are part of the school’s story, but they are not what the youngest students are ready to hear.
Palladino said she does not go into the events of 9/11 with her class. She said the children are too young and that the scope of what happened is beyond their understanding right now. That leaves the teachers with a harder job than simply retelling the day: they have to decide how to mark a national loss without turning it into something children this young cannot grasp.
That balance is what makes the school’s approach resonate 25 years later. The educators at St. Patrick Catholic Academy are carrying their own memories, but they are also translating a day of smoke, fear and confusion into a classroom language fit for 3-year-olds. For now, that means the history is present, but the details wait for older students.
