Students process feelings though art

On the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Carson High School officials erected a 60-foot flagpole in front of the school and a monument to the Twin Towers.

Then-principal Glen Adair told the students: "These are times that mark our existence. I doubt you will ever forget when the towers of America were attacked by agents of terrorism."

But a decade later, students' memories are already becoming hazy.

"I remember 9/11, but it's hard to remember the details because I was pretty young," said Cole Dufresne, 17.

The campus monuments served as props in a performance to help high school students understand the gravity of that day and to help them process their emotions after last week's massacre at IHOP that left five dead, including the gunman, and seven injured.

Drama students struck poses reminiscent of 9/11 and other wars. Two girls were poised to jump from atop one of the towers. A boy hugged the flagpole. A business woman ran with her briefcase in hand. Another used her cellphone to tell loved ones she was OK. A Muslim woman, wrapped in a burqa, held two white handkerchiefs and cried out: "I'm innocent. I lost a son, too."

Hannah Hartman, 16, created the character as a reminder that hatred is not the answer.

"An entire country was vilified for the acts of a few people," she said. "People see a woman in a burqa or a man in a turban and they see terrorists. They see evil. But so many women lost sons to a cause they didn't believe in. They were victims, too."

Images from that day were sketched out in chalk on the sidewalk, along with quotes from text messages and voicemails.

Abigail Hill, 17, cried as she saw the scene unfold.

"I think about everybody who died," she said. "They were innocent."

Drama teacher Karen Chandler encouraged visiting students to walk in and around the performance art and explore their feelings about 9/11 and the IHOP shooting.

"You have to respond to it in order not to hold it inside," she said.

Andreah McCoy, 17, said the experience was helpful.

"It's showing what happened in the past and joining it together with the present," she said. "It helps us to mourn."