Fatemeh Taheri-Fard was the principal of Shajareh Tayyebeh School. She was not only a teacher, but she also supported young men and women in Minab tom make their marriages easier. She even lent her husband’s wedding suit to the grooms to ease the financial burden of their marriage. She was very active, in religious meetings after school, in communication with families, in following up on people’s problems. When Fatima was hired in this school, the school had 40 students. In her 8 years of work, the school’s capacity increased to more than 400 students and 40 teachers.
The martyr’s mother recounts that one night in December, Fatemeh told me, “Mom, I had a dream that a martyr’s body was being buried from the Arzaq intersection to the Gendarmerie intersection, and I was watching.” A few months later, Fatima herself was buried on that route.
From the first moments when the school staff heard about the attack on Tehran, they decided to close the school and began calling the families of students, asking them to come and take their children home. Those timely calls saved around 280 students.
At the time of the first explosion, Fatemeh Taheri-Fard was in the schoolyard. After the first missile hit the school, she moved toward the staircase to reach the upper floor, where the girls were. Others tried to stop her because the danger was too great. But she answered with words that carry the full weight of a teacher’s heart: “I must go. My girls are upstairs.”
She reached the upper floor. Only a few seconds later, the second missile arrived. That missile killed her and others around her.
The account of the rescue and rubble removal later showed the same truth again and again: the teachers had thought first of the children. Her husband said that during the removal of the debris, they saw teachers who had died while holding several students in their arms. In the final moments of Shajareh Tayyebeh School, Fatemeh Taheri-Fard did not run from danger. She ran toward her students.