Teacher next door came knocking on my window and screaming, Turn on your TV!

Turn on your TV!

And I said, but I'm teaching.

She said, no, no.

Turn on your TV.

And I did.

And suddenly the world fell apart.

On September 11th, 2001, I was in my classroom, room 107 at the Connellsville High School.

I had 10th grade college prep English students.

Terrorism was not in our vocabulary at the time.

What happened at Shanksville?

What happened at the Pentagon?

And it was just like, how?

Why?

What are we going to do?

My nephew would come to my house for dinner on Sundays.

And this one Sunday he said to me, hey, did you know that if you're a 501 C3, it's a federally recognized charity?

You can apply for a piece of the destroyed World Trade Center.

Well I did some research.

And I prepared a letter.

It was a year, and I pulled up this email and it said, Dear Mr.

Shear, I'm reaching out to you personally.

And I almost hit delete because I wasn't Mr.

Shear, and it didn't make any sense.

It said that we were one of 1100 entities from all 50 states and six foreign countries to have been chosen to receive a piece of the destroyed World Trade Center.

Johnny Marrow said, I have the insurance, I have the trucks.

We'll get that piece of steel.

Mrs.

Shears came down and said that she had a possibility of getting a piece of the World Trade Center in New York, and she wanted to know if we wanted to be involved?

And yes.

You know, we wanted to do it for our country and for our community.

So we lined up all the transportation and we handled all that.

February the 11th of 2011, at 4:00 in the morning, we boarded a coach bus outside of my house and went to JFK international.

And when we finally got there, the group that was taking care of distributing the pieces of steel put it on a skid loader and sent it out to the truck.

And when they got it centered, two of the veterans went up onto the trailer and they covered it with American flags, and they tied it down.

You can't believe the number of towns that I drove through.

When people saw, they stood and cheered and blew their horns.

They knew this was something important.

So it was brought back to Connellsville.

And the next day, the mayor of Connellsville had arranged for there to be a parade up through town so that the members of the community could see this piece of history.

And they drove it around the school, and the kids were out so they could see.

And then it was stored, because of the renovations at the high school.

It was stored for two years and they were deciding where it should go.

So what was decided is that it was going to go into the foyer of the high school, the lobby.

When classes change and kids come in in the morning.

One of the first things, if they're coming through the front door, is to pass that monument.

And as you get closer to it and you look down at the bottom, is the word India.

Now, wait a minute.

Why would the word India be on this piece of steel?

So I did a little bit of research and it was the early 90s.

There was a bombing in the garage portion of the North Tower, and the destruction was repaired with imported steel from India.

So to look at that piece of steel.

Oh, you have something remains of the Twin Towers.

Yes, we have remains from the garage portion of the North Tower.

To be able to say specifically where something came from is is phenomenal.

It's almost impossible.

You know this song, where were you when the world stopped turning that September day?

I was in that class full of innocent children.

And I will never, ever forget that.