‘9/11 Principal’s’ Legacy Of Unity Shared By Son 20 Years Later

SARASOTA, FL — When Stevenson Tose-Rigell, now 30, learned that President George W. Bush would be visiting his Sarasota elementary school on Sept. 11, 2001, he was thrilled.

Then a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, Stevenson was a budding political junkie and had followed the 2000 presidential election, which Bush narrowly won, the year before.

“Obviously, Florida was a big deal. It came down to Florida being a deciding factor whether it was going to be Bush or Al Gore,” he said. “My parents were watching the debates. It was cool seeing this guy had just won the presidency and I was going to meet him less than a year later. I knew who he was. He was a familiar face that I had seen on TV. It was pretty cool.”

Ahead of the president’s visit, nobody had any idea that day would be a transformative moment for America. As the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded that morning, Stevenson and others at the school — and around the world — quickly realized life in the United States was about to change forever.

The visit was a big deal for the school and its principal — who also happened to be his mother — Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell. She had turned the school’s academic standing around since taking it over. Bush’s visit was to honor her hard work and to promote his No Child Left Behind Act, her son said.

“The school was hovering around a D, I want to say, on the schooling grade,” Stevenson said. “She was able to take it from a D to a B and missed a few points from an A. It was a complete 180 (degree change) for the school. It was prominent enough to capture state and national recognition.”

That morning, Bush met with a second-grade class at Booker for a reading exercise, listening to the students read to him from the book “The Pet Goat.”

It was during this reading that hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, told the president about the crash and Bush said he initially believed it was a tragic accident, according to Politico.

At 9:03 a.m., a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, was flown into the World Trade Center’s South Tower.

A few minutes later, Card told Bush — quietly, so he didn’t upset the children — that the second plane had hit the twin towers and the country was under attack.

The president didn’t immediately leave the room. He let the students finish their book, shared a few words with them — complimenting their reading skills and encouraging them to read more — and posed for pictures with the children and school staff, reports said.

Then, in an empty classroom, he consulted with Vice President Dick Cheney and New York Gov. George Pataki.

Not long after this, around 9:30 a.m., Bush addressed the nation for the first time from the elementary school. As he spoke to Americans, Booker students and staff stood behind him.

“Today, we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country,” he said.

The president also “ordered a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”

He added, “Terrorism against our nation will not stand.”

Stevenson’s class was chosen to stand behind Bush on the stage as he spoke about the attack. Originally, he planned to speak about his federal education initiatives.

Earlier that morning, while the president read with second-graders, Stevenson and his classmates waited in the library, unaware of what was unfolding at the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the country.

“Nobody I was with, at least in the library, knew of anything going on,” he said. “The media had set up there and we were just waiting for Bush’s arrival. Nobody knew what was going on until Bush came in and made the address to the nation.”

The president’s short speech “definitely was alarming,” though Stevenson didn’t fully comprehend what was happening, at first.

“It was something that was serious. I heard faculty members gasp or sigh like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is terrible,’” he said. “I knew something wasn’t right when he was saying it.”

After Bush left the school, Stevenson and the other students went back to their classrooms. Many teachers turned their TVs on to watch the news coverage, which is when he saw the footage of the planes hitting the twin towers for the first time.

“That’s when we had the chance to see the devastation that was going on in New York,” he said. “That’s when it hit a lot of us at the school. This wasn’t just a plane that lost a wing or scraped a building. This was a straight-up, intentional driving into a building. It’s hard to see that image.”

As the day unfolded, hijackers also flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, while United Airlines 93, which was heading toward Washington, D.C., crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. About 3,000 people died in the coordinated terror attacks that day.

As he watched the news, Stevenson understood that the world was about to change.

“I remember asking one of my teachers, who is no longer here, ‘Does this mean we’re going to war?’ She was very tall and looked down at me over her glasses and gave me a silent nod,” he said. “We’d just been attacked. I knew about school fights. When someone runs up and hits you, there’s going to be a retaliation.”

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Though the attacks and the lives lost on 9/11 overshadowed his mother’s educational successes that day, it was still a pivotal moment in her career, Stevenson said. “For this moment to really define her career was a big thing and then opportunities and things came after that because of it.”

There were national and international interviews about the Sept. 11 attacks and No Child Left Behind, and she also received a fellowship overseas to the Oxford/Cambridge Roundtable in 2005. She was even featured in the documentary “Fahrenhype 9/11.”

“There was a lot going on that elevated her career and trademarked her career as ‘the 9/11 principal,’” Stevenson said.

Gwen even wrote a memoir about her 30-plus years as an educator and administrator, and her Sept. 11 experiences, called “The 9/11 Principal.”

She died in 2007, when she was 56 years old — and her son was just 17 — before she could publish her book. He eventually published her story in 2019. Proceeds from the book will go to Take Stock in Children’s Mrs. Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell Scholarship.

“I finally got her dream accomplished to have it out there for the world to know, to give people more access to that story and the day itself,” Stevenson said.

The 30-year-old Manatee County resident earned a degree in journalism and broadcasting and has worked in sales for the past 10 years.

The most important thing to him is sharing his mother’s story with the world. Her message is one that’s needed more now than ever, he said.

“It’s an overall message of hope for the nation. How can we unify again? In the last several years, we went from being a super, almost united country, like the for real, for real United States of America after 9/11,” he said. “Now, we’re back at odds again. Republicans versus Democrats. Gays versus straights. Abortion versus non-abortion.”

Stevenson added, “I’ve never witnessed so much mistrust and division in the judicial system as I have the last couple of years.”

Still, he’s hopeful for the world on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And his mother’s story is a big part of his hope.

He plans to share her legacy far and wide, and dreams of getting into as many schools as he can across the country to talk about her and her work.

“I want to make sure her legacy lives on. Her headstone says ‘9/11 Principal.’ That sets her apart from everything else,” he said. “I’m proud of her. She definitely was a remarkable person and I wish she was still here. Her history is solidified, and her legacy is solidified, and I want more people to know about her.”