By DAVE COLLINS
Associated Press
NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) - Talk about Sandy Hook
Elementary School is turning from last month's massacre to the future,
with differing opinions on whether students and staff should ever return
to the building where a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six
educators.
Some Newtown residents say the school should be
demolished and a memorial built on the property in honor of the victims
killed Dec. 14. Others believe the school should be renovated and the
areas where the killings occurred removed, like Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colo., after the 1999 mass shooting.
Those appear to be the two prevailing proposals as
the community prepares for public hearings on the school's fate Sunday
afternoon and Jan. 18 at Newtown High School. Town officials also are
planning private meetings with the victims' families to get their input.
One of Newtown's selectmen, Jim Gaston, said the building's future has become a popular topic of discussion around town.
"It's pretty raw, but people are talking about it," he said. "We'd like to hear from as many people as we can."
It's a bittersweet discussion for parents and
former students who have many good memories of Sandy Hook Elementary
School, the site where Adam Lanza shot his way into the building and
carried out the massacre before committing suicide as police arrived.
"I'm very torn," said Laurie Badick, of Newtown,
whose children attended the school several years ago. "Sandy Hook school
meant the world to us before this happened. ... I have my memories in
my brain and in my heart, so the actual building, I think the victims
need to decide what to do with that."
Susan Gibney, who lives in Sandy Hook, said she
purposely doesn't drive by the school because it's too disturbing. She
has three children in high school, but they didn't attend Sandy Hook
Elementary School. She believes the building should be torn down.
"I wouldn't want to have to send my kids back to
that school," said Gibney, 50. "I just don't see how the kids could get
over what happened there."
Fran Bresson, a retired police officer who attended
Sandy Hook Elementary School in the 1950s, wants the school to reopen,
but he thinks the hallways and classrooms where staff and students were
killed should be demolished.
"To tear it down completely would be like saying to evil, 'You've won,'" the 63-year-old Southbury resident said.
Residents of towns where mass shootings occurred have grappled with the same dilemma. Some have renovated, some have demolished.
Columbine High School, where two student gunmen
killed 12 schoolmates and a teacher, reopened several months afterward.
Crews removed the library, where most of the victims died, and replaced
it with an atrium.
On an island in Norway where 69 people - more than
half of them teenagers attending summer camp - were killed by a gunman
in 2011, extensive remodeling is planned. The main building, a cafeteria
where 13 of the victims died, will be torn down.
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.
Until Newtown decides what to do, Sandy Hook
students will continue attending a school renovated specially for them
about 7 miles away in a neighboring town.
Newtown First Selectwoman E. Patricia Llodra said
that in addition to the community meetings, the town is planning private
gatherings with the victims' families to talk about the school's
future. She said the aim is to finalize a plan by March.
"I think we have to start that conversation now,"
Llodra said. "It will take many, many months to do any kind of school
project. We have very big decisions ahead of us. The goal is to bring
our students home as soon as we can."
___
Associated Press writers Michael Melia and Pat Eaton-Robb in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.
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