Rosemont High Teacher Keeps 9/11 Lessons Alive for a Generation Born After the Attacks

For most of us, September 11, 2001, is etched into memory. We remember the phone calls, the silent streets, the long hours in front of the TV. But for students at Rosemont High, that day isn’t a memory at all. It’s history, something that happened before they were born. And that’s exactly why social studies teacher Victoria Stolinski refuses to let it become just another chapter to skim.

Every September, Stolinski sets aside her normal curriculum and devotes a full lesson to 9/11. She walks her students through the timeline, the aftermath, and the ways those attacks reshaped everything from air travel to foreign policy. Her students, many born nearly a decade after 2001, come in knowing the phrase but not the weight behind it. As she puts it, they know 9/11 in general, but they don’t understand the depth of it. Stolinski watched the events unfold from San Francisco that morning, and she teaches the lesson because she felt people were forgetting.

Twenty-five years later, that sense of forgetting feels more real than ever. Students like Mason Arp, Jack Lawrance, Alan Rico Hernandez, and Aubrey Collins are walking out of her classroom with something they didn’t have before, a real understanding of a day that changed this country. So here’s a question for you: if you could sit down with a teenager today and tell them one thing about September 11th, what would it be?