School back from horror
Sandy Hook Elementary School has risen from its ashes with this message, spelled in a green tile mosaic, for all who enter its doors: “Be kind.” The rebuilt, $50 million school now stands on the site of its demolished predecessor in Newtown, Conn., where deranged gunman Adam Lanza killed 20 first-graders and six staff members in December 2012.
The new school was funded by state money and has safety features including a front gate, surveillance cameras, secure doors and bulletproof glass.
Poignantly, the design also includes a painting of ducks in flight that decorates the administrative-offices area, recalling the ducks that used to gather at the old school.
A sculpture of ducks in flight, in fiberglass, adorns the lobby.
“Let me say unequivocally that we would trade, in a minute, this beautiful new school for the more familiar and aged Sandy Hook school built in the ’50s, if we could just change the past,” local First Selectman Patricia Llodra said on Friday, during a media tour of the facility.
It’s now up to the town’s adults, she added, “to commit that despite its birth from a horrible tragedy, that Sandy Hook school will be a place of laughter, love and learning.”
Some 60 percent of the former staff are returning to the school, while others have retired or taken new jobs, said Superintendent Joseph Erardi.
The old school was demolished in the year following the massacre; the footprint of that school is now a parking lot.
Classes are scheduled to begin on Aug. 29.
Llorda says that there had been some initial talks about changing the name, but they never went far.
As she explained, “We are proud to be Sandy Hook School, and the fact that a horrible thing happened here doesn’t erase all the wonderful things that happened in our 300year history.”
The school is still weighing a decision, to be finalized with victim families, on whether any memorial should be built on site commemorating the deaths, Erardi said.