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Alumni
Profile: Anna Switzer '65
Anna Switzer felt exhausted. But watching the children leave her building on the final day of school last June, the principal of Public School 234 in lower Manhattan also felt "incredibly proud. Considering the circumstances," she said, "our teachers and our kids had done an amazing job." The circumstances were daunting, indeed: P.S. 234 stands just four blocks from the site of the World Trade Center. After the attack on Sept.11 last year, children whose parents couldn't pick them up right away took shelter there as the towers collapsed. When the air cleared sufficiently, they and their teachers fled to safety in a school further north. Then came five months of dislocation and a massive community effort to return the students' lives to normal. "Kids saw some pretty terrible things that day," recalled Switzer, who has led the staff at P.S. 234 since 1991. "In addition, they were displaced from their homes." They lost their school for several months, first crowding into shared classrooms at P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village and then moving to St. Bernard, a former parochial school. They didn't return to their own building until Feb. 4, and then, due to air-quality concerns, didn't have recess outdoors until late March. Repeated terrorism alerts in the spring prompted the school to cancel its Field Day. Students saw friends move from their Tribeca neighborhood. "Plus some parents lost their jobs, and everybody was very anxious during this time," Switzer added. Children's reactions varied greatly. For some, Switzer said, healing meant trying not to think about the attacks; others needed to talk, draw and write about their fears. Some students seemed fine by day, but had nightmares. Some lay awake as trucks hauling Ground Zero debris rumbled past their homes. Some kids worried about fire; some feared riding the subway: "Everybody worried a lot about whether it was safe to fly, and all of us are very prone to being startled by a loud noise," she said. For the most vulnerable children, or those who simply needed to talk, two counselors offered out-of-class discussions. But perhaps the biggest force for healing, Switzer said, was the return to the ordinary business of school. Teachers relied on the basic tools of good teaching -- listening, letting kids express themselves, helping them improve and take pride in their work. "And it turns out that in doing their best work and staying very productive and focused on school, the kids were comforted, and it was rather therapeutic," Switzer said. The school's staff, suffering their own fears and losses, rose to demands no one could have anticipated. Education is about modeling, Switzer said, and "the kids got to see the best teachers in the whole world modeling bravery and hard work and stoicism and altruism, and really determined to have these kids have a normal year in school." A generous community and nation helped too. Parents and staff teamed up to get St. Bernard ready for the students. Well-wishers sponsored trips to the Big Apple Circus and Broadway shows and donated thousands of dollars for school supplies. Books, letters, flags, drawings, plants and teddy bears poured in from all over. "We wanted our kids to understand how embracing the country was toward them and how generous Americans were," Switzer observed. Crews from National Geographic and PBS's Reading Rainbow series arrived as well to film television segments about the school. Did all the gifts and attention spoil the kids a bit? "Probably," Switzer admitted. "But on the other hand, when they had to give up Field Day, they did it with grace." Despite the distractions, P.S. 234 achieved academic distinction: Its students earned the highest scores in New York City last year on the fourth-grade state reading test. Much of Switzer's own support came from her family, especially from her husband and BU classmate, Michael Switzer '65. "I was really able to take comfort in the fact that he thought I was doing a good job," she said. For 2002-03, Switzer said her number-one aim was "to get to Sept. 12." Aside from watching the Reading Rainbow segment about the school, the school made no plans to mark the anniversary of the attack. Switzer's goal as a principal, she said, is rooted in the basic idea of American public education: "to grow as many educated people as possible so that you can have a democratic society." But, she added, "I also hope to be able to do it in an environment of community, consensus and decency." Certainly those values helped carry P.S. 234 through the trials of 2001-02. One legacy of that year, Switzer observed, is "the lesson that even a situation as horrible as this can be an opportunity for both grownups and kids to work together, to learn together, to be productive. And that if you have to go through something like this, you hope to emerge better than you were before." -- Merrill Oliver Douglas, MA '82 |
