Newtown parents Sunday discussed perhaps demolishing the grade school where Adam Lanza massacred pupils and teachers last month.
"Unless you were a parent of a Sandy Hook student that day and had to walk to that firehouse, you don't know how we feel," Christine Wilford, the mother of two children. "On that day, I looked around and it was my Sandy Hook family." When the parents arrived at the school after the December massacre, they were ordered to wait near a local firehouse, while authorities sifted through the crime scene.
The kids are presently attending classes in a nearby town, following the Adam Lanza incident, in which 26 people were gunned down at the Sandy Hook school. This is an interesting topic, because you can comprehend Newtown residents people not wanting to send their young children back there. It would indeed be eerie walking into that building every day, knowing Adam Lanza had once turned it into a killing field. Some Newtown children might even wind up transferring to private schools, instead.
Columbine High School was remodeled after the tragedy there in 1999, and remains open today. But, those students are teenagers, and not young children. This is of course a very difficult decision, because you are destroying a perfectly good facility, which cost millions of dollars to construct. And, where would the money for the new Sandy Hook Elementary School come from?
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Comments: 4
Buildings don't kill--people do!
Razing this facility might even give some people who feel powerless a way to feel powerful (a feeling not to be confused with empowered) in the sense of believing that they could not only kill people but, also, kill great big buildings.
A much better solution might be one of--after all of the damage to the building has been repaired--keeping the school closed for the remainder of the school year and, after that, starting out with just one grade level attending there: kindergarten, as those children wouldn't include those who had been there to be part of the shooting.
Older children who would feel okay about returning to the school might also make up a kind of upper class--initially, with, perhaps, two or three grades being taught in the same room. Nobody would be pressured to return there, however and could keep on attending school elsewhere if they feel better about it.
The school experience there could, also, schedule fun activities so that it would begin to become more associated with those things than of being the site of mass-murder.
We need to keep in mind that, before this tragedy took place, Sandy Hook Elementary was a place associated with wonderful memories--that it's a great school that just happened to have something horrible take place within its walls.
The horror of that day should be remembered only for the purpose of taking steps to make sure that this--and other similar incidents happening in Anytown, USA--will be less likely to repeat itself in the future.
It shouldn't be dwelt upon in ways that render the schools (and other places such as theaters, restaurants, etc.) haunted and no longer able to be used, because this kind of response is not only a major waste of money but, also, an encourager for history to repeat itself.