Ada Rosario Dolch had served as the principal of the High School for Leadership and Public Service in lower Manhattan for 6 years when her life changed irrevocably on September 11, 2001. On the fourth day of the school year, when most of the ninth graders were still strangers to her and to each other, she heard an ominous “boom” at 8:46 a.m. As fire and debris began falling from the sky, Ada Dolch knew that she was responsible for the safety of the students left in her care, and she acted.
The high school is situated in a 14-story building two blocks from where the south tower of the World Trade Center used to stand. According to the school’s safety plan, in an emergency, she and her students were to remain in the building or evacuate to the World Trade Center. After assessing the situation, she made the decision to evacuate, despite orders from the District to remain in the school. Her leadership proved critical in helping bring her students to safety.

During the evacuation, she, the teachers, and staff remained calm and evacuated the students—including some in wheelchairs—floor by floor. They decided to gather at Battery Park. Once everyone was evacuated, Ada Dolch ran with the last group south toward Battery Park, just as the towers came crashing down. They were engulfed in what she describes as a “tsunami wave” of smoke and ash. Picking themselves up, the teachers gathered groups of students and herded them toward ferries leaving for Staten Island and New Jersey. In spite of the horrible events that day, none of her 550 students were lost and, except for one broken toe, not one student was physically injured.

Recently, we had the opportunity to talk to Ms. Dolch about her experiences and what she would like other schools to know about the importance of crisis planning.

The Challenge: How did the special focus of the High School for Leadership and Public Service help your school respond to what you faced on 9/11?

Ada Dolch: The focus of the school is to foster the principles of democracy, including leadership, and to create a setting where students have opportunities to help strengthen the nation’s public service. Most often, the 13- and 14-year-old students who come to our school have no idea about either leadership or public service. But we know what we want them to leave with 4 years later. The essence of our philosophy, which we believe down to our very bones, is that we don’t live alone and that everything that we do touches others’ lives. We teach the students to always think about the effects of their actions on others; that it’s not “me first,” but “me in the company of others.”

It is this philosophy that allowed every student and staff member to be prepared for September 11th. No matter what was going on, we trusted that no one was going to act in a way that would make the situation more dangerous by a selfish act. The kids held hands. They stayed together, thinking, “I gotta take care of someone else.”

The same went for the adults, who couldn’t think only of themselves. No one panicked, pushed others aside, and said “Me first!” In some film footage of that day, you see people running away in panic. That didn’t happen to us. No one split and ran. They did what they had to do. When different groups got split up, the staff’s first thought was always, “Where are the kids? I must find the kids.”

For 6 years under my direction, we at the High School for Leadership and Public
Service had been putting out
a message. We wanted the students to recognize that everyone must take on a leadership role and everyone must make a contribution to society if we want to be a part of the solution and not just a part of the problem.
Each and every member of our learning community took on a role of responsibility and leadership on that day. We didn’t have a chance to think about our actions. We all simply aimed to ensure the safety and welfare of everyone who crossed our path.

The Challenge: Were there particular emergency plans or preparations that you had in place that were especially helpful on that day?

Ada Dolch: Ironically, the thing that helped us the most was the thing that we had griped about the most. The school has a very unusual physical facility. It’s a 14-story building with a sub-basement. Because of its structure, it’s like no other building I had ever worked in before. My office is located on the seventh floor. When I first came to the building, I thought, ‘How am I going to communicate with the other floors? If there is a problem on the eighth floor, how will I know about it?’ In other schools, I could just look down the hallway. Now, if something happened five floors above me, how would I know? I obsessed about it.

I instituted a system of walkie-talkies everywhere and gave every teacher on every floor a responsibility. They all knew who was to take care of whom in an emergency. Because of the unusual nature of our structure, we spent time constantly doing drills. I ran them announced, unannounced, early in the day, late in the day, during the lunch period, all to find out, ‘How fast can I get the kids out of this building?’ In the end, all of the planning and preparation we had done paid off.

<continued on the next page: Planning and Preparedness Pays Off>