City Council Speaker Julie Menin will unveil a $1 million education fund Thursday to teach New York City students too young to remember the September 11 attacks.
Menin, who represents the Upper East Side, will announce the investment at a wreath-laying ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum — exactly one week before the 25th anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks. The money was secured in the city’s Fiscal Year 2027 Budget and marks a major expansion of the museum’s educational programming for a generation with no firsthand memory of that day.
“It’s about teaching the next generation,” Menin told The Post. “In the days and weeks after 9/11, the city was really unified.”
“You felt that unity, and there were so many heroic acts from first responders and from everyday New Yorkers, and it’s really a focus of trying to remind young people what the events of 9/11 meant, what the terrorists tried to take away from our city and our country,” she added.
Nearly one-third of Americans alive today were born after Sept. 11, 2001, according to the museum, and millions more were too young at the time to remember the day. The funding aims to bridge that growing temporal gap as students become “physically further and further removed from the terror attacks.”
The bulk of the investment — 75 percent — will cover free field trips for all 20,000 public school eighth graders across the five boroughs. Each audio-guided visit costs upward of $23 per student and includes exposure to victims’ final phone calls, the damaged remains of FDNY rescue engines, and the thousands of names etched into the memorial’s reflecting pools.
“It’s an educational initiative to ensure that this next generation is fully aware of what transpired on 9/11, and all of the different acts of heroism, the loved ones that were lost, and the rebuilding efforts as well,” Menin said.
Roughly $250,000 will fund virtual programming to reach students beyond city limits, including virtual field trips and classroom materials for teachers. The museum has long operated workshops, conferences and trainings for educators of grades 3 through 12, and this year will add a live program timed to the quarter-century mark.
The Anniversary Digital Learning Experience (DLE) offers a free 35-minute on-demand film with first-person accounts from the attacks and their aftermath, paired with live chat access to museum staff throughout the anniversary day.
“We want to make sure that more young New Yorkers have the opportunity to come to the memorial, to experience the Memorial & Museum firsthand, to hear the stories of family members, of first responders, and to understand why Sept. 11th is very important to always remember and to never forget,” Menin said.
The speaker framed the educational push around resilience and democratic values rather than trauma alone.
“It’s important for the students to realize what the terrorists were trying to take away from us. They were trying to take away our way of life,” she said. “They were trying to destroy our freedom. And we were able to fight back and rebuild. And that’s really what the 9/11 Memorial honors.”
The tragedy and the city’s subsequent unity and rebuilding remain central to New York’s cultural identity, Menin emphasized, even for those born long after the Twin Towers fell.
Menin will lay a wreath at the Memorial Thursday morning to formally announce the funding.