Medfield Schools to Recognize 9/11 at Joint Assembly

Principals at and Schools are using the solemn 10th Anniversary of 9/11 as an opportunity to teach students about the impact and significance that day had on America.

“For the 10th anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11, [Medfield High School principal] Robert [Parga] and I have been [planning] to work together at the secondary schools to have a joint assembly, hopefully on the football field and really focus on the community aspect of the tragedy of 9/11,” Blake Middle School principal said. “We want to make sure we recognize [9/11] in an appropriate manner.”

The joint assembly will be held on Friday, Sept. 9 on the Medfield High School turf field at 9 a.m., weather permitting and will focus on the affect the attacks had on communities around the country.

“We want to think about what happened after [9/11] and how did the communities come together, globally, internationally and locally as well,” Vaughn said. “How did we handle that adversity? That is on a large-scale adversity, but thinking about for our students, we want that message [to be how] important community is. That is a theme at both schools for the year, moving forward.”

The high school and middle school staffs will spend time this week leading up to Friday’s assembly discussing how best to present 9/11 to their students.

“We are going to take some time as a staff and meet after school and Gary Stockbridge, one of the former Medfield High School teachers, is going to talk to our staff about events leading up to 9/11 and how that transpired and the history behind it,” Vaughn said.

In some instances, with 9/11 occurring a decade ago, teachers at both schools will be teaching students about the tragedy rather than discussing what they remember from that day.

“Some of the students here at Blake were one, maybe two years old when it happened,” Vaughn said. “We have some younger teachers, that were maybe 12, 13, 14, in middle school at the time when it happened too. So leading up to the assembly we will be doing some history lessons for the kids and having them have the historical context of the events and after really focusing in on some of the community aspects and with the unveiling of the memorial on Sept. 11 in New York City.”

At Blake, Vaughn said the staff will aim to use the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 to connect with other curriculum and lessons.

“We will be showing some video clips and we will be having some discussions and I think it is a great opportunity to talk about with the kids how the memorial came to be,” Vaughn said. “For eighth graders in particular, we go to Washington D.C. each spring and we visit a lot of memorials, so I think it is a great way to springboard off into that. We’re trying to make it so it is not just an isolated event on Sept. 11 and really try to find some inter-disciplinary connections as well because it really is a significant event that happened in our history.”

Above all, Vaughn stressed the importance of presenting the events of 9/11 in an age-appropriate manner to his students.

“The 10th anniversary and how the world changed after,” Vaughn said would be the focus of the assembly. “We are going to be talking about that with our students and really trying to do so in an age-appropriate manner because we talked about it with [Parga]; it is a different level of conversation you would have at the high school versus six graders.”