On a late-summer morning 25 years ago, the world changed.
Airplanes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Another crashed in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people died in the largest terror attack on U.S. soil.
Dawn Johnson was an English teacher at Nickerson High School on 9/11, and KMUW’s Jonathan Huber was a freshman in her class. Huber recently sat down with Johnson, who is now superintendent of schools in Hutchinson, to reflect on that day.
>Transcript
HUBER: By the time I sat down in Miss Johnson’s second-hour freshman English class, word of the attacks had started to spread through the halls. Johnson was making her way back from getting coffee in the teacher’s lounge when some students asked if she had seen the news.
JOHNSON: Some students had kind of run down and said, ‘You know, we're under attack. Have you seen that? We're under attack.’ And I said, ‘You guys stop messing with me,’ because everyone knew I was in the military, and I said, ‘You guys stop messing around. That's not even funny.’ And they’re like, ‘We’re not kidding.’ …
“And so I walked back to my classroom, turned on the TV that we had in there, and of course, I don't remember the anchor at the time, but (he) was going through everything that was happening. And then that whole rest of the day, that's what our English class watched, until students were released at the end of the day.
HUBER: I don't remember any teaching happening that day. Was it just like watching the TV and talking about what we were seeing?
JOHNSON: My first year, I taught probably six hours of freshman English, and so you have a plan the first hour, and then you see what went wrong. So the second hour, you do something better, and then by the sixth hour you have a great class. … So, I think we sat and watched at some point through the day. I had students really just reflect on, ‘What does this mean? What is happening?’ Lots of English words that we would talk about, about how we might respond to what was happening, and maybe predict what was going to be America's response to this event. I wouldn't be surprised if that first day, we just were watching the news for the entire period.
HUBER: America’s response was almost sure to be a military one, and Johnson was in the Army Reserve. She had signed up to help pay for college, but on 9/11 the reality of that pledge became clear.
Four months after the attacks, her unit was mobilized
JOHNSON: I believe I got notified like maybe on a Thursday that we were going to deploy, and had to report on a Monday … And so I went in and talked to Mr. Abbott, who was the principal at the time, and said, ‘You need to find me a sub, starting Monday.’ And then I spent 36 hours trying to get personal affairs in order to leave, and then really writing lesson plans for the entire next semester for a sub, and not wanting that sub to have to figure it out.
HUBER: Johnson was assigned to a military police unit that originally was supposed to take detainees from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She took a military police course at Fort Riley to learn about the duties.
JOHNSON: While we were at Fort Riley, that mission changed, and we were just sent to be prison guards. They were standing up a second prison (Camp Delta), and so they sent us there to run Camp Delta. We spent nine or 10 months in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, looking after – I don't even remember the number – maybe 600 detainees at the time.
HUBER: After two deployments, she returned to Nickerson and worked her way up the school system. She then served as a principal in Little River and superintendent of the Nickerson/South Hutchinson district. In 2022, she was named the superintendent of Hutchinson schools.
Johnson holds a doctoral degree and two master’s degrees. She worked her way up the ranks in the Army Reserve, too, and is the deputy commander of the 88th Readiness Division in Wisconsin that covers a 19-state area. She was previously the commanding general of an 8,000-solider unit based in Florida. Johnson says her military service influences how she guides the school district.
JOHNSON: I think I have experiences a lot of other superintendents probably don't. You know, between the two careers I have 75 years – about 41 in the military and 34 in education – and so (I have) a lot of that breadth of experience and leadership. (The military) was the first to embrace diversity, the first to kind of tackle some social issues of bringing people together for a common goal, which is to defend the nation.
You've got to really build the team and get the team going in the direction that you want. There is a process for tackling a problem and getting to a solution. I think all of those kinds of experiences help me reduce the amount of time that it might take to make a decision in education, because I can get right to a process to do that.
HUBER: On the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Johnson says it’s worthwhile to think about that day.
JOHNSON: I think we're in a unique environment today, with drones and technology, and I just hope that we don't become complacent and don't forget how easy it is for other people, nefarious actors or our enemies, to be thinking about how they want to attack America.
We think we're pretty comfortable when we don't think about it. It's always somewhere else (that) those things happen. So I hope we never have to experience 9/11 again. But it is something we definitely should not forget about, not let our guard down.
