Katelyn Mazenko planned to have her first grade class at Janney Elementary School on Thursday write sentences, play bingo and solve math problems. But after pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol building the day before, the six and seven-year-olds logged on to virtual class overwhelmed with questions.

How did they get in?

Why was it mostly white people?

What did they want? 

So Mazenko said she scrapped her lesson plans and spent nearly an hour answering students’ questions, distilling concepts about voting and race into words young children could understand. She explained that misinformation means “lies that have been spread.” She referred to anti-racism lessons the youngsters learned earlier in the school year, reminding them “in America, the rules have not been fair for Black and brown-skinned people.”

As scenes of Trump loyalists forcing their way into the Capitol played on television and social media, educators across the District quickly began devising how they planned to address the insurrection in classes the next day. They knew the crisis would touch D.C. students — many who have visited the Capitol, live near the building or have family who work there — in a distinct way.

Schools arranged counseling services for students. Administrators shared guidance about how to manage difficult conversations. Teachers revised their teaching plans, carving out time for in-depth talks. Several charter schools canceled virtual or in-person classes for the day, including KIPP DC and Friendship Public Charter School, the two largest charter networks in the city.

In a letter to the community, Susan Schaeffler, the founder and CEO of KIPP DC, denounced the actions by pro-Trump extremists as an “act of domestic terrorism” and said staying home was the safest option for children and educators. KIPP also postponed COVID-19 testing for students and free school meal distribution to Friday.

“The pain and anxiety being felt in our community is real,” Schaeffler said. “Hate, racism, and insurrection have no place in the District of Columbia, our home.”

At schools that held classes, some teachers said talking to students about traumatic events had become all too familiar, adding to the emotional toll of a year marked by the coronavirus pandemic, the police killing of George Floyd and the protests for racial justice that followed.

In the spring, Mazenko said she spent time calming anxious children after the pandemic forced learning at the Tenleytown school online. During this school year, she incorporated conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement in a social studies unit about American values and peaceful protest.

By the time class began Thursday, Mazenko said most of her young students had already talked about the crisis at the Capitol with their families, watched it on the news or caught glimpses of it from videos on their parents’ computers.

“We’ve been kind of in a constant state of addressing trauma for the past year,” she said.

Each day at Inspired Teaching Demonstration School in Edgewood, children in Jessica Jones’ fifth grade class practice mindfulness techniques, including journaling. They learn about empathy, forgiveness and integrity.

In the morning, Jones asks her students how they are feeling. The children normally share they are tired of distance learning, sleepy or happy, Jones said.

On Thursday, Jones created an online survey to collect the students’ responses. Many chose these words to describe their feelings about the day before: sad, nervous, angry, over it.

She steered the conversation away from talking explicitly about the violence at the Capitol, careful not to trigger emotional trauma in the children. Instead, she said she focused on asking students questions about what changes they felt needed to be made.

“When these things happen, the first thing I think about is the kids,” Jones said. “I pretty much just gave them a space to talk about what was bothering them… them being able to express their emotions helps them process what they’re going through.”

Elsewhere in the city, high school students at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School in Anacostia compared the police response to the insurrection with the level of police force Black Lives Matter protesters encountered over the summer.

Social studies teacher Ocean-Miracle Morris said her students examined the police treatment of Trump loyalists who mobbed the Capitol and compared it with the experience of demonstrators who protested for racial justice.

In a presentation to her World History and African American studies classes, she shared two slides with photographs, back to back. The first showed members of the National Guard dressed in helmets and camouflage gathered at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in June, blocking the path of protesters who mostly sat cross-legged behind metal barricades in front of the monument. 

The second showed the demonstration outside the Capitol Thursday, where hundreds of mostly white pro-Trump supporters were able to flood the building’s front steps and climb on scaffolding. Police later used chemical irritants and flash bangs to clear the protesters.

Morris said her students, some of whom participated in the summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations, were frustrated by what they viewed as disparate police treatment — but were also not surprised.

Many of her students at the mostly Black school said they felt police would have responded with more force if large groups of people of color tried storming the Capitol.

“A lot of them stated, ‘if it were us, we would be dead, we would be shackled, we would be attacked,’” Morris recalled. “They were very vocal about the unfairness and inequality.”