On the morning of 11 September 2001, daycare teacher Tara Jones and her colleagues at the Children's Discovery Center, located inside 5 World Trade Center, found themselves responsible for evacuating 28 infants, toddlers and preschoolers after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. As panic and debris engulfed the complex, the teachers abandoned their rehearsed evacuation plan when their designated route towards Building 7 became blocked, forcing Jones to make a split-second decision to lead the children out via a little-used maintenance route instead. This improvised choice would prove critical, and every one of the 28 children survived.

The daycare centre, which cared for young children of workers dropping them off before their commutes, was reduced to a memory of breakfast tables and paintings in the aftermath, with 5 World Trade Center itself badly damaged by fire and falling debris from the collapsing Twin Towers. Building 7, the point towards which staff had originally planned to evacuate, later collapsed entirely at 5.20pm that day, underscoring how consequential the teachers' change of route had been. Speaking to the Daily Mail ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Jones recalled believing she and the children would die, describing an escape that relied on teachers' quick thinking and refusal to leave any child behind.