Mention accountability and most principals think about state assessments and “adequate yearly progress.” However, when I think of accountability, I think of a lot more than state tests, I think about real world assessments. Today, September 11, is the anniversary of 911, and I couldn’t help but think how our school was put to a severe, real world test that day. It was one of those events in life when the unexpected occurs for which we could not prepare and which tested us to our core.

Looking back over the years, it seems that our school faced an inordinate number of external events that ultimately tested our mindset, values, beliefs, and the strength of our relationships. If we had done our job and walked the talk, we would come through each with shining colors. If we hadn’t, our weaknesses would be exposed.

We had so many things happen that, one year, one side of our annual faculty t-shirt told the story of how “WE SURVIVED” twelve events which included Columbine, 911, the Beltway Sniper, two wars, one hurricane, and a “snowmageddon.” Although these events were all much different, they all tested our culture, our commitment, our focus, and most importantly, our relationships with our students and our relationships with our colleagues.

September 11, 2001 holds a special place in my memory. We can all remember where we were and what we were doing on that fateful day. I can remember it as though it were yesterday.

We were in our weekly staff meeting and our SRO rushed in and told us to turn on the television, which we did just in time to see the second plane fly into the Twin Towers live. This was particularly disconcerting to me because I had stayed in the Vista Hotel on a number of occasions, and that summer, our family had visited New York, bought theater tickets on the ground floor of the Towers, and rode to the top of the Towers.

The worst part of the day for me was the rumors and what we didn’t know. There were so many conflicting reports on the television that we decided to turn it off and have our librarian compile a report consisting only of what we did know. Our police department gave us a report that a nearby apartment building had been bombed and that cars were exploding on Route 7, which was only a block from our school. All these reports later turned out to be false. Our school was so close to the Pentagon that the smoke from the crash floated over the school until late in the day.

I am not going to go into all the details of the day, except to say that our students and our staff passed the test with flying colors. Our students trusted us and we respected them. They always felt safe and secure in our building and we all felt like we were part of the same team.

Personalization was always a priority for our staff and a long-standing strength of our school. We had a number of former Peace Corps volunteers teaching in our school, which helped us establish caring relationships with our diverse student body, which had students from eighty-eight countries speaking sixty-six different languages. In fact, we were so diverse that, in an article that was published that month, National Geographic Magazine had called our school “the most diverse high school in America.”

Many parents came to our school that day with the intent of taking their child home. However, when they saw how calm everything was at our school they decided to allow them to remain. I remember one of our School Board members, who was sobbing almost uncontrollably in the cafeteria, being told by her daughter “Go home, mom. Everything is okay here.”

The Ultimate Test

We had no way of knowing it that day, but the real test of our relationships and our school culture would come in the weeks and months that followed 911. Our diverse student body included a large Muslim population, which made up approximately one-sixth of the school. Reporters and journalists flocked to our school all wanting to know how the kids were getting along. Were there any incidents?

In early November, four of our Muslim students were interviewed on a morning NPR broadcast. It didn’t take long for the interviewer to ask the students if they had been harassed or if there were any incidents at school. Each of the students indicated that school had gone on normally, that they always felt safe at school, and that, to their knowledge, there had been no incidents.

The Bottom Line

Schools are about a lot more than bricks and mortar or tests and test scores. Schools are about people and their relationships. We were tested many times by outside events that we could never have anticipated. Fortunately, our entire staff made daily deposits into our “emotional bank account” so that, when the unexpected occurred, we had a large reserve of goodwill to draw from. In retrospect, these unforeseen events made us a better school and they brought us closer to each other.

By the way, I mentioned one side of our faculty t-shirt told how “WE SURVIVED.” On the other side of the shirt was the following: “WE THRIVED! J.E.B. Stuart High School, A Breakthrough School.”