The Child Care Center That Survived 9-11: A Tribute to the Teachers We Rarely Hear About

Every year on September 11th, referred to by many as 9-11, we retell the stories we know by heart – the first responders, the passengers of Flight 93, the towers falling. This year marks 25 years since that morning, and yet I only just learned about a piece of that history that had somehow passed me by entirely: the story of the child care workers who brought dozens of children, including babies and toddlers, to safety out of the World Trade Center.

A colleague and dear friend in child care shared a video with me today on 9-11, and it stopped me in my tracks. I want to share it here, because I think it belongs alongside every other story we tell about that day – and because it says something important about the profession so many of us have given our working lives to.

A Child Care Center in the Shadow of the Towers

The Children’s Discovery Center sat inside 5 World Trade Center, a smaller building just across from the Twin Towers. It was, by every account, an ordinary Tuesday morning. Parents and grandparents dropped off their children as they always did – some of those parents headed into the towers themselves for the workday ahead. By 8:45 AM, more than two dozen children, ranging from a few months old to four years old, were settled in for breakfast.

Teacher Tara Jones remembers the moment everything changed: an unfamiliar, extremely loud sound overhead. Not an explosion exactly – something stranger. She and her colleagues couldn’t see the towers from where they stood, but they could see people running in the streets outside.

It was 8:46 AM. American Airlines Flight 11 had just struck the North Tower.

No Time to Think, Only to Act

What happened in the minutes after is almost hard to comprehend. More than two dozen children were in the center’s care that morning – some barely old enough to walk, several still infants.¹ There was no drill for this.  There was only the knowledge that every child had to get out.

Teachers scooped up babies. Teachers took toddlers by the hand. Staff moved the children out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan with whatever they had on and whatever they could carry – no strollers, no plan beyond getting every child away from the building.¹

Fourteen staff members rushed to gather the children and got them out. Jones and her colleagues led the group to sit along the edge of a nearby cemetery.

Then the second plane hit. As everyone began running, teacher Onica Sarjeant, who had arrived late that morning with her own four-year-old son in tow, found herself separated with one cluster of children heading toward the pier. Jones ended up with another group of children running toward City Hall. There was no time to coordinate; each teacher simply kept moving, keeping the children close and shifting them farther from danger.

Both groups pressed on for miles through falling ash and debris. Sarjeant’s group eventually found refuge in a church. Jones’s group ran into police officers warning that more planes might be coming, before strangers helped drive them uptown to St. Clare’s Hospital.

Sarjeant later recalled that the children themselves stayed remarkably calm – but she and her coworkers had to hold their own composure together, because in that moment, nothing else mattered but the children in front of them.

“We had to keep them safe. Those were our babies.” ~ Tara Jones, Early Childhood Teacher

Every Single Child Made It Home

Every child and every staff member from the Children’s Discovery Center survived September 11th. Some of the children were eventually sheltered at a nearby hospital, where staff arranged cribs and helped contact media so that frantic parents – many of whom had just escaped the towers themselves – could find their children again.

One of those parents, Supurna Vedbrat, whose 18-month-old son Mahir was in the center’s care that day, later reflected that the selfless focus of those teachers said everything about their character – that what they did that morning stood shoulder to shoulder with the work of any first responder.

Why This Story Belongs to All of Us in Child Care

I think many of us who work in this field know a version of this truth already, even if we’ve never had to live it at this scale: caring for other people’s children is not a small job. It is not “just watching kids.” It is vigilance. It is judgment under pressure. It is showing up, every single day, ready to make the right call for a room full of children who depend on us to keep them safe.

Most days, that call is small – a scraped knee, a nap schedule, a tricky drop-off. But the readiness is always there, quietly, underneath the routine. On September 11, 2001, a group of child care teachers in Lower Manhattan proved exactly what that readiness looks like when it’s needed most.

Twenty-five years later, their story is still surfacing – new to people like me, who had heard so many accounts of that day but never this one. It deserves to be told, and retold, alongside the rest.

To every child care teacher, past and present, who has ever kept their calm so a child didn’t have to feel afraid: this one is for you.

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This post was inspired by a Retro Report video documenting the firsthand accounts of the Children’s Discovery Center staff and families, and by additional reporting on the events of that day.

Watch the Video: Chaos and Escape: How Day Care Teachers Saved Dozens of Children on 9/11 | Retro Report

1. The Retro Report video and its transcript describe “more than two dozen children” being dropped off that morning, which is the figure used throughout this post. Some secondary accounts, including a 2016 personal essay from a parent, put the number closer to 40 children and 10 staff members – a discrepancy worth noting for readers who encounter both figures.