The Sandy Hook School Building Task Force, which meets Friday night, has narrowed the options down to two: renovating or rebuilding on the existing school site or constructing a new school on nearby property.
Whatever choice is made, a new or renovated school won’t be ready by the start of the next school year.
The task force, which includes 28 local elected officials, may vote on a recommendation to the local school board or postpone a decision to another meeting on May 10.
Sandy Hook Elementary School hasn’t housed students since the Dec. 14 killings when gunman Adam Lanza, 20, opened fire at the school. He earlier had fatally shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their Newtown home and he killed himself as police arrived at the school.
Sandy Hook Elementary School – Newtown, Conn. – Dec. 14, 2013 (credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The 430 surviving students have been attending a renovated school in the neighboring town of Monroe that has been renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Town residents have expressed mixed opinions on what should happen to the school building.
“It’s up to the parents who are directly involved in that school,” one resident told WCBS 880’s Paul Murnane.
“I wouldn’t want to have to send my kids back to that school,” said Susan Gibney. “I just don’t see how the kids could get over what happened there.”
“My primary concern is actually the educators. None of the families are going to have children in the next five years through that school, they all will be aged out,” another resident said.
Fran Bresson, a retired police officer who attended Sandy Hook Elementary School in the 1950s, wanted the school to reopen, but he thought the hallways and classrooms where staff and students were killed should be demolished.
Residents of towns where other mass shootings occurred have grappled with the same dilemma. Some have renovated, some have demolished.
Columbine High School in Colorado, where two student gunmen killed 12 schoolmates and a teacher in 1999, reopened several months afterward. Crews removed the library, where most of the victims died, and replaced it with an atrium.
Virginia Tech converted a classroom building where a student gunman killed 30 people in 2007 into a peace studies and violence prevention center.
An Amish community in Pennsylvania tore down the West Nickel Mines Amish School and built a new school a few hundred yards away after a gunman killed five girls there in 2006.
One new Sandy Hook Elementary school prototype, discussed in a nearly 200 page report, has minimal entrances, high windows, a lockdown system and 26 glass cupolas in memory of each victim.
For more information about Friday’s Sandy Hook meeting, visit www.newtown-ct.gov.
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