“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry Adams

We are four days in.

The buses ran. Lockers opened. Somebody cried on the kindergarten sidewalk, and it was not always a child. If you have walked into one of our ten schools this week, you already know what I know: a building full of students sounds entirely different from a building waiting for them.

I want to tell you how we started.

Opening Day On September 2nd, before students returned, our entire staff gathered in the high school auditorium. A full house, from every school and every role in this district.

We opened with our students and their many musical talents. As they came down the aisles and onto the risers, I will tell you honestly that they set the tone for the year better in ten minutes than I could have in thirty. Our music teachers deserve enormous credit for what they built in a matter of days.

Then we did something different. Every year the superintendent gives an address. This year I did not.

Instead, I had the privilege of sitting down with six members of our staff and three of our high school students and asked them what they have seen. A business teacher. Our head custodian. An elementary physical education teacher. A music teacher. Our multilingual facilitator. A middle school social worker. And three young people who have spent their entire lives in our schools.

None of it was rehearsed. I had not heard a single answer before the room heard it.

What happened next is the reason I am writing about it now.

Our business teacher told us a student doesn’t need a week to decide whether they belong in her classroom. It takes a few minutes. So she stands at her door every period, learns their names, and says she is glad they are there.

Our physical education teacher told us that when a child starts pulling away, she doesn’t ask why they aren’t participating. She finds out what they like. She gets to know them outside the gym. She has them build the game themselves, and when there is no time to teach it, they take it home to their families.

Our head custodian told us he talks to students. He finds them in the lunchroom and out on the patio. He said everybody wants to feel important.

And then a junior, the youngest person on that stage, sitting in front of a room full of adults she had never met, told us what matters most to her as a student. She said it is when a teacher takes the time to know her outside of class – not as a student in a seat, but rather a person.

Three adults described a practice. A student confirmed it from the only side that can. Not one of them had heard the others speak.

Last spring, we surveyed our students, our staff, and our families about how it feels to be here. We have studied that data for months. The survey told us where we stand. In half an hour, nine people told us what to do about it.

Today There is one more thing about this particular Friday.

Today marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. Not one of our students had been born yet. For every child in our buildings, this is history, and history is something we get to teach rather than something they have to carry.

So we teach the part worth teaching. Firefighters and police officers who went toward what everyone else was running from. Emergency crews from across Bergen County who got in their trucks and drove. Ordinary people standing in line for hours to give blood and neighbors who had never spoken, making room for one another.

That is the story our students should have. When we tell them that a community is built by ordinary people looking out for one another, this is the largest example we have. Our own firefighters, police officers, and ambulance crews are Fair Lawn parents, Fair Lawn neighbors, and Fair Lawn graduates. This is a good time to tell them so.

Each of our schools is marking the day in a way that suits our students’ ages. A conversation in the classrooms where it belongs. For our high school students, this is more than a date to learn. They have grown up inside the world that came after it, in ways most of them have never had reason to notice, and that is worth a real discussion.

What comes next Nine people cannot speak for an entire community, and four days do not make a year.

But the tone gets set early, and I have seen ours. It is in a doorway at Memorial, a gym at Milnes, and a hallway at the high school at seven in the morning. It’s in every adult who learned a name this week that a child did not expect them to remember.

Thank you for the start you have given our students. Thank you to the custodians, secretaries, aides, drivers, and food service staff who made ten buildings ready. And thank you to our families for handing us your children every morning on the strength of a trust we intend to keep earning.

It is going to be a great year.

Read the entire Corner Column here.