POULSBO — On Sept. 11, as the World Trade Center towers in New York were destroyed by terrorists, students at North Kitsap High School watched the unfolding tragedy on television.

And while no day since has been so intense, the subject has not left the classrooms.

Randy Powell teaches Contempoary World Issues, one of the classes that has addresses the attacks and the dozens of subsequent issues raised by them.

Since the attacks, Powell said, he has adjusted the flexible demands of the class, and the students have responded.

“On Sept. 11 we were watching these events happen. They (the students) saw the towers go down,” he said.

The students responded, he said, with hard work.

“You should have seen the wall,” he said, referring to the one wall of the LGI room in the high school. At one time, he said, it was covered with papers collected and written by the senior students in the class.

“They had daily updates of arrests, daily updates on the rescuing of victims,” Powell said. “They traced economic markets. They kept up with the NASDAQ and the Dow. They know who was being bombed and where.”

The students did so, Powell said, out of their own interest and his: “I turned the class toward that,” he said. “It fit the needs of the curriculum and the class.”

Anthony Ward, a student in Powell’s CWI class, said the deeper explorations the students made were valuable.

“You could figure out what was going on, not just what was on the local news,” he said.

Ward’s group followed the effect the attacks had on the stock market. He tracked the Dow and NASDAQ.

Classmate Katherine Shkapsky followed the fatalities of civilians in Afghanistan.

And while Ward’s graph of stock market fluctuations mirrored the 9/11 attacks, so did Shkapsky’s project: a map of Afghanistan.

Instead of quenching the students’ thirst for news, Shkapsky said, the subject makes her want to learn more.

“It made you want to go home and watch the news,” she said. “Mostly I watched CNN.”

Students did more than track subjects related to the attacks of 9/11; they also debated several issues, such as what should be done to countries that harbor terrorists; should civil liberties be curtailed to protect the country; and whether America was the target of a Jihad.

Even when the class’s activities weren’t directly about the war, Ward said, the subject sometimes made its way into the classroom.

As part of a regular assignments, students must research a country outside the U.S. and present a report as to that country’s current events.

“For almost every country, (the current events) were usually related to 9/11,” Ward said. “That was all over their newspapers.”

Stephen Pagaard, who is the chair of the Department of History and Social Sciences, said the events of Sept. 11 and beyond have not often entered the formal curriculum, because curriculum is planned and coordinated in advance. He stressed that the teachers have stuck to planned subjects and not dwelled on the 9/11 attacks too much. But teachers have been injecting current events into the classroom, he said.

“It’s been something that’s referred to, but not every day,” he said. “but I’ll take some minutes at the beginning of class if there’s significant change.”

Pagaard said “My guess is that it’s informal and casual, except for maybe the senior CWI classes.”

Still, Pagaard said, the subject still managed to inject itself into discussion.

“In my U.S. history class we just finished the civil war, and many of the same ideas came up,” he said, “such as Sherman’s march and civilian casualties.”

He said, “It doesn’t take much thinking to find parallels.”