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A steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center arrived Tuesday at the Florida elementary school where then-President George W. Bush learned the United States was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
The beam was brought to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota as part of the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’s “Steel Across America” tour commemorating the upcoming 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, who informed Bush that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, attended the ceremony.
Bush was visiting a second-grade classroom at the school on the morning of Sept. 11, when Card approached the president and told him what had happened.
“I walked up to the president,” Card recalled during Tuesday’s ceremony. “I whispered into his ear, ‘A second plane hit the second tower, America is under attack.’”
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The moment, captured on live television, became one of the defining images of the Sept. 11 attacks and the early hours of the national crisis.
Card returned to the campus Tuesday alongside former second-grade teacher Sandra Kay Daniels, whose classroom Bush was visiting when the attacks unfolded.
“Just being on this campus and remembering what happened when I came and whispered in the president’s ear that America was under attack … it takes you right back to that day, the feelings, the emotion, the duty, the honor,” Card said.
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Daniels said the memories of that morning have stayed with her ever since.
“That day changed not only Emma E. Booker Elementary School students and staff, but it changed the world, the community,” Daniels said.
“It’s an everyday thing for me,” Daniels added. “I will never get away from that. I was with the president, and he was with me. That happened here at my school.”
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Inside the school’s library, a section dedicated to Sept. 11 includes an original copy of “The Pet Goat,” the book students were reading when Bush received the news.
The Sarasota stop marked the seventh destination on the nationwide remembrance tour, which is transporting a steel beam from the World Trade Center to communities across the country ahead of next year’s 25th anniversary of the attacks.
The ceremony included appearances from local officials, first responders and members of the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which was founded in honor of FDNY firefighter Stephen Siller, who died responding to the attacks in New York City.
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Former students who were inside the classroom that morning also returned to the school Tuesday, including Natalia Jones-Pinkney, who was seated just feet away from Bush during the reading lesson.
“I don’t know if I understood at that time that that was really going on,” Jones-Pinkney told FOX 13. “I was just excited that we were meeting the president.”
Now an adult with a second-grade daughter of her own, Jones-Pinkney said returning to the school underscored how deeply the events of that day shaped her life.
“Being there, reading to the president, shaped our lives,” she told the station. “That’s something we’ll never forget.”
The steel beam was later made available for attendees to approach and reflect upon as part of the memorial event honoring the victims and first responders killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
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