REMARKS BY HEAD OF SCHOOL POLLY FREDLUND P’25 | SEPTEMBER 11, 2026
Good morning.
I want to take a moment this morning to commemorate today: September 11, 2001, on its 25th anniversary. There were bells on the Middlebury Green this morning, marking the moments: 8:46am, when the first plane hit the North Tower; 9:03am, the second plane and the South Tower; 9:37am, the Pentagon; and 10:03am, Shanksville, PA.
Today is a day of remembrance and reflection for the nearly 3,000 innocent lives lost and the first responders whose heroism called them into our nation's worst day, many of whom gave their lives, that day and in the years that followed, simply because they showed up for people who needed them.
For our students, this happened ten years or more before you were born. For most of the adults in this room, we remember exactly where we were.
It was a beautiful, clear day here in Connecticut, and just 85 miles away in New York City. I was 27. I had just moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and heard the news over the radio. I spent the rest of that day with my mom and my husband, watching it unfold on television.
Others were here at Westover, where three bells rang, the custom at the time, and the whole community gathered in Red Hall. Then Head of School Ann Pollina led students and teachers, seated here just like you, through the uncertainty and grief of that day with unparalleled grace and strength. Some of our own alums lost adult children in the towers that morning.
We have another community member who was living in greater New York on 9/11, who watched the towers burn from their balcony, watched them fall, and then spent the weeks after volunteering through their church to feed first responders working the wreckage. And a younger community member, who was in elementary school that day, who grew up to become a volunteer firefighter herself, because 9/11 showed her that first responders are the ones who show up on someone's worst day.
Whatever your connection to this day, whatever it touched in your own life, it is a day of unnecessary loss and lives cut short as well as of remembrance, for our country and the world.
Twenty-five years later it is also a day to remember who we are at our best: the neighbors who ran toward danger, the strangers who carried each other down the stairs, the communities, like ours, that gathered and held each other up. That is what I hope we carry forward. Not just what we lost, but how humanity shows up for one another.
Thank you.
Be Boldly You
Westover School admits students of any race, color, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, national and ethnic origin, or disability to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the School. As a gender-diverse girls school, Westover welcomes applicants and students who are assigned female at birth and/or identify as girls. The School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, national and ethnic origin, disability, or any other status protected by applicable law in the administration of its educational policies, admissions and financial aid policies, and athletic or other school-administered programs.