Kyle Koval stands inside the gymnasium on the Shanksville-Stonycreek School District campus on June 28, 2021.
Story by MEGAN TOMASIC
Photos by KRISTINA SERAFINI
Tribune-Review
Sept. 9, 2021
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, started out like any other for those in the Shanksville-Stonycreek School District.
The yellow building in Stonycreek Township bustled with the start of a new school year as elementary and high school students went about their lessons in the combined building, completed art projects and vied for the Presidential Physical Fitness Award in gym class.
But at 10:03 a.m., everything stopped. There was a loud bang. The school shook.
“The TV started bouncing and it sounded like somebody came up and kicked our door to the classroom,” said George Childers, 36, who was a junior at Shanksville-Stonycreek High School the day of the crash. “My teacher ran out into the hall and thought somebody was messing with us.”
Chloe Koval, 27, then a 9-year-old third grader, said her class turned to the back of the room thinking a box had fallen.
Kyle Eric Koval, 31, who is now Chloe Koval’s brother-in-law, said his sixth grade gym class took a brief pause to wonder what happened before returning to their game.
The reality was more tragic than any of the former students’ theories.
Four hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 had tried to take control of the plane in an attempt, investigators believe, to crash the aircraft into the White House. But passengers and crew members fought back, forcing the plane to go down in an empty field about six miles from the school.
The terrorist attack was one of several that took place in the United States that morning 20 years ago. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. By 9:03 a.m., the South Tower was hit. Thirty-four minutes later, a third plane crashed into the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C.
“Nobody knew anything, so we kind of just all continued on,” said Kyle Koval, of Brothersvalley. “There was some commotion in the hallways and things like that.”
Teachers had their own theories as to what caused the building to shake — a transformer blew or a small plane crashed in Buckstown, a village in Stonycreek Township. As time went on, they tried to keep the day normal as much as possible, even as they learned the reality of the situation.
“I think the parents were actually more worked up than the kids were,” said J.P. O’Connor, a fourth grade social studies teacher who still teaches at the school. “We had things under control at our school. Nobody was crying, nobody was upset, nobody was anything. We were just there with them.”
O’Connor was waiting for his students to complete art class that morning when he turned on CNN to catch up on the day’s news.
As he turned on the TV, broadcasters switched to breaking news out of New York City.
“I saw that the first plane had already crashed into the North Tower,” O’Connor said. “At that point, I didn’t know what was going on.”
O’Connor watched for a few minutes before he had to pick up his students and walk them back to the classroom.
When they were back, O’Connor told students, “There’s something really weird going on in our country right now,” and put the news back on.
By that point, the second tower had been hit.
After watching for about a half hour, O’Connor went on with the day, telling students, “You don’t have to worry about anything because we live out here in the boonies.”
Twenty-five minutes later, the school shook, bouncing the ceiling tiles in O’Connor’s classroom up and back down.
Childers, in the 11th grade, also was watching the news about the Twin Towers being hit when Flight 93 crashed. After thinking somebody had kicked the door to their classroom, Childers said a neighboring teacher told his class to come over to their room.
“We ran over to their window and we could see the big mushroom cloud,” Childers said, referencing the black smoke that rose above a nearby treeline.
O’Connor also saw the smoke. He said it looked as if it was located below the school’s playground.
“We knew what we were watching on TV and kind of put two and two together that it was related, but we didn’t know really much other than that,” Childers said.
By 10:06 a.m., the Shanksville-Stonycreek principal called Somerset County dispatch to ask if she should evacuate the school building, according to the National Park Service’s Flight 93 website. However, O’Connor said students were permitted to stay for the remainder of the day.
Still, student dismissals started coming in around 10:30 a.m., O’Connor said, about a half-hour after the crash, and picked up as students made their way through the lunch line.
“We’d at times just take full trays of food as they’d come through the line and say, ‘I’m sorry, I have to take your tray of food. You’re mom or dad’s down in the office waiting for you now,’ ” O’Connor said.
Following lunch, O’Connor took his remaining fourth grade students to watch the movie “Free Willy.” Other elementary students were taken to the gymnasium to play games.
By the end of the day, only about half a dozen elementary students remained, O’Connor said.
Chloe Koval was one of the elementary students who was dismissed early that day.
“We were all just kind of confused and then I remember after my mom had pulled me and my sisters out, we went down to the house and everybody was congregating over at Ida’s, the country store, and everybody was just looking up at the sky,” she said, referring to the general store along Main Street now called Snida’s.
Koval, of Hooversville, did not recall receiving an explanation at school about the crash, but said her mother told her a plane went down nearby and that others had hit the Twin Towers.
“I understood that something bad happened, but not really the extent of it or how it was going to impact us,” said Chloe Koval, who is now the school nurse at the district.
Childers and his sisters were also dismissed from school following the crash.
Childers, who left the school in his own vehicle while his mother picked up his sisters, said he went exploring but was unable to see anything. He also went out with his father and uncle when they were home from work, but they were stopped about a quarter-mile from the crash site.
Unlike Chloe Koval and Childers, Kyle Koval stayed in school until dismissal.
He noted that in terms of proximity, his childhood home and the school were close to the same distance from the crash site.
“The town was just different,” Kyle Koval said of the aftermath of the crash. “It was quiet yet people all around. … The town was quiet and strange.”
He noted community members pulled together to cook meals for firefighters, who spent hours at the scene of the crash. Others helped their neighbors clean up debris from the plane that scattered throughout town and in surrounding communities.
By the fall, a fence was erected at the crash site as a way to memorialize the act of those aboard Flight 93. The site became a place where loved ones and others could leave items in honor of the victims and quickly garnered the attention of the nation, drawing high-profile figures like presidents who now visit the memorial on the anniversary of the crash.
“It was kind of wild because immediately we were known for something catastrophic and yet something that brought the entire nation together at the same time,” Kyle Koval said.
Chloe Koval said “it was different” having high-profile people visiting the town.
“You’re just used to things being so quiet, and then it turned into this big thing,” she said. “But it was cool that people were coming to see us, and I remember in school afterwards we were getting letters from students from all over the world and just a lot of recognition.”
In addition, Chloe Koval recalled meeting students from a school in Ohio at the memorial site where they signed their names and left teddy bears.
Kyle Koval said an artist came and worked with students to help build a memorial garden in front of the school.
For O’Connor, the response from people across the country and within the community was “unbelievable.”
“It was a tremendous outpouring for the people and for what the people of Shanksville did,” O’Connor said. He recalled elementary teachers receiving boxes of teddy bears that were handed out to students. Various groups from across the country also visited the school in the wake of the crash.
O’Connor now works to keep those memories alive. Each year, he sets up a small memorial in his classroom featuring photos of the World Trade Center before the attacks, photos showing the destruction of the towers after, books and publications that outline how the country came together in the aftermath and three teddy bears that were sent to the school.
The goal, O’Connor said, is to continue to teach younger generations about the events of the day.
“They need to know it because this is the first time, this was the first war that we won on terrorism,” O’Connor said. “The first battle they won was on Flight 93 trying to take that plane back.”
Megan Tomasic is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Megan at 724-850-1203, mtomasic@triblive.com or via Twitter @MeganTomasic.