Since 9/11: A Teacher Remembers

In commemoration of the decade since Sept. 11, Goose Creek Patch is looking at the stories of several local residents on that day and how it has impacted each of their lives. Share your first-person stories by emailing greg.hambrick@patch.com. We'll collect them and run them Sunday.

Fifth-grade teacher Anne Semmler was in a Fairfax County, Va., classroom on Sept. 11, 2001. A fellow teacher told her to turn on the TV because of a" current event."

The first image she and the children saw was a replay of one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. Then, coverage shifted to the Pentagon.

After several minutes of watching the horror unfold, including an attack on the Pentagon, Semmler had seen enough.

"I turned off the television because some of my students began to cry," Semmler said, noting most of them had parents working in downtown Washington, D.C.

"Soon afterwards, the principal announced that all televisions should be turned off. That scared the students even more."

Parents flooded the school to take their children home early. Semmler remembers, in particular, the rumors that were swirling about other potential attacks, like a plane with a bomb heading for Dulles Airport.  

Now a teacher at Sedgefield Intermediate School in Goose Creek, Semmler said her family moved, in part, because of the trauma of Sept. 11 and the threat of a terrorist attack on Washington.

"It scared my family and I so much," she said. "Our nation was under attack, and we weren't far from the most powerful city in the nation."

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