“The other thing I’ve been hearing a lot,” she added, “is the trouble teachers are having with their own feelings. She had no business going up in this thing.” Fox said older students probably share: “This lady was a mother. “I just talked to a young man in high school who told me that the kids in his school were all angry with the space agency because they’d been pushing too much, and they shouldn’t have tried yesterday.”Įlementary-school children have also expressed a feeling that Ms. “There are some kids who are angry,” said Ms. Fox said, her staff has been answering calls from schools throughout the New England area. Fox, director of the Good Grief Program in Boston, which is designed to help teachers support students in schools where a child or colleague has died. “We’ve been hearing about kids who want to go over and over ‘How was the shuttle built? What was the ice doing on it yesterday?’ A variety of questions about ‘How do these things work?’ ” said Sandra S. In school after school across the country, teachers, students, and administrators described long minutes of silence followed by crying, despair, anger, and questions for which there were no satisfactory answers. We were still hunting for the shuttle at the time we saw the explosion.” Gregory, superintendent of the Bath Central School District in Bath, N.Y. “Some of us did the final countdown,” recalled Charlotte A. But as the moments continued, it was just a shock, utter disbelief.” “Initially, we didn’t know what to think. When the accident occurred, there was just “stunned silence,” said a Hall science teacher, Steve Fannin, who had applied for the teacher-in-space program along with 11,000 other candidates. The school is home to “Classroom Earth,” the nonprofit group that was coordinating the satellite relay of Ms. Howard said staff members were “really just trying to get through today” before making other plans.Īt Hall High School in Spring Valley, Ill., 150 students were viewing the NASA broadcast of the launch in the cafeteria. Morgan, who was scheduled to replace Sharon Christa McAuliffe on the flight should the need arise.Īfter the explosion, teachers kept the students gathered in a few large viewing rooms for an hour or two to discuss what had happened and to follow the news coverage. In McCall, Idaho, some 1,000 students in grades K-12 were watching the liftoff and keeping an eye out for their hometown teacher, Barbara R.

Challenger space shuttle pbs