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Schools

An Independent School Tackles Global Responsibility

Kent Place Upper School history teacher, Reba Petraitis, took a lead role in developing the 4 Action Initiative's 9/11 curriculum.

Formulation of the country’s first 9/11 Curriculum has a special significance at Kent Place School.

The head of the independent all-girls school, Sue Bosland, was on an education committee at the Liberty Science Center when Kent Place was asked to be one of the independent schools involved in writing the curriculum.

“We wound up being the only independent school,” Bosland said. 

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The 9/11 Curriculum is a product of the 4 Action Initiative, a group of 16 teachers and administrators from across New Jersey formed to develop a Terrorism and 9/11 curriculum for K-12. Sponsors of the curriculum include  Families and Friends of 9/11, the Holocaust Commission and the Liberty Science Center.

With little hesitation, Bosland selected Kent Place’s Upper School history teacher, Reba Petraitis, to lead the effort.

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“At the request of the families, we were to look at 9/11 not as the only event but to view 9/11 in context of terrorism and the world in which we now live,” Petraitis said.

Petraitis, who had a lead role in writing the curriculum over a three-year period, said one of the biggest challenges with the project was making the curriculum relevant to children, most of whom were relatively young or not alive on September 11, 2011 when the terrorist attacks occurred.

It took three years to complete the program, which was soft-launched on July 14, but the true launch is set for the New Jersey Education Association’s annual convention in November. 

“The next step is to help teachers in the state get trained on how to teach this,” Petraitis said. “It is very difficult to take controversial topics and walk into a classroom as say, ‘this is what we are gong to talk about today.’ ”

It is with that recognition that the 4 Action Initiative approached the overarching task of building a new curriculum from scratch with a global perspective.

Although the core subject matter is the terrorists attacks of 9/11 2001, the curriculum was built as a modular system of concepts designed to spark an analytical thought process in children of all grade levels.

For example, a lesson titled, "Making Choices: Bystander, Perpetrator (bad guy), Victim, Rescuer (Hero)," asks students many prodding questions to get their thoughts started, including: “What scares you? What frightens you?” and invokes interdisciplinary connections of social studies, character education, art and literacy.

“Objectivity was really our major goal,” Petraitis said.

There was also particular attention placed on the grade level to which concepts are taught.

“Many of high school students will remember  9/11 but were too young to understand,” Petraitis said.  “The primary school curriculum is geared around not looking at terrorism, but about bullying. We take the concept of bullying and use it as a segue to introduce the concept of terrorism in middle school and take it further into high school.” 

The bullying connection has direct relevance to students of nearly all grade levels as of September 1, when New Jersey’s “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act” went into effect.

New Jersey, whose school districts reported 2,846 incidents of bullying, intimidation, harassment, or threatening behavior in the 2008-2009 school year, now has the toughest anti-bullying statute in the country. 

In addition to increased scrutiny on student behavior, the legislation put in place a comprehensive internal investigation and reporting structure for school boards and chief school administrators.

One of the merits of the curriculum is that is leverages existing state standards in subject areas such as social studies, English, art, music and science.

That comprehensive nature wound up being a boon to Kent Place.

“We had only one school, we had just one course called contemporary history and we had a  teacher who had already been engaged in (the subject matter),” Bosland said. “We had a lot of ease when compared perhaps to a larger school district that would just be learning about it.”

As a teacher in an independent school, Petraitis said that another difference perhaps is the high level of support she was shown by her administration “to implement and infuse new ideas into a curriculum.”

With July’s soft launch, the 4 Action Initiative presented a curriculum guide called, "Learning From The Challenges of Our Times: Global Security, Terrorism and 9/11 in the Classroom." (The PDF file is featured in the media attachment for this story).

Paging through it, several common threads become apparent, but none stronger that this one: “a major goal in writing this was to make our students better decision makers to give them all sides,” Petraitis said.

“There are no right or wrong answers in this curriculum. It was not written to say this is what you need to believe. It was written to say that now that you have looked at all sides, and used analytical skills, what do you believe?, what decisions have you made and how do you support them?”

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