School officials consider tearing down Columbine
In the 20 LITTLETON, COLO. — years since the massacre at Columbine High School, the building has become a macabre tourist attraction for the curious and the obsessed. They travel from as far as Brazil or Japan, hoping to walk the halls, to look for the two teenage gunmen’s lockers. They come every day, and more come with each passing year.
Now, in an effort to stop the escalating threats against the school and lessen Columbine’s perverse appeal to copycats and so-called Columbiners, school officials are proposing a radical idea: Tear it down.
“The morbid fascination with Columbine has been increasing over the years,” Jason Glass, the superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools, wrote Thursday in an open letter titled “A New Columbine?” “We believe it is time for our community to consider this option.”
School officials said they were still in the early stages of exploring what to do, but one idea was to scrap much of the existing structure and rebuild it farther from the road, where entry onto the school grounds could be better controlled and tour buses could not get such an easy glimpse. The school would keep its silver and blue colors and mascot, the Rebels.
Its name would remain Columbine High School.
The idea has divided a tightknit community of current Columbine students, survivors of the 1999 attack and victims’ families, who share a fierce love for the school. It has also stirred a debate about whether schools, churches and other places devastated by mass shootings can ever exorcise their legacy by demolishing the buildings where the violence unfolded.
“My heart says, ‘No way,’ ” said Josh Lapp, 36, who was in the library that day when the two teenage gunmen entered and started shooting. “It’s not changing anything.”
Some survivors said that their memories of hurt and healing were still bound up in Columbine’s concrete walls, and that the school should be preserved. Others doubted that school officials could actually succeed in erasing Columbine’s dark allure if they simply rebuilt the school on the same grounds and kept its name.
Ana Lemus-Paiz, 18, a recent Columbine graduate, said most students she had spoken with were against the idea of razing the school. She counted herself among them.
Lemus-Paiz was not even alive in 1999, when the shooting took place, but she said she had been part of a process of community healing that involved reclaiming the school. While the world may look at the building and see the Columbine of 1999 — a symbol of tragedy — the community, she said, had moved on. “That building is a symbol of strength,” she said. “Our community really did bind together to show that we are stronger than what happened.”
Lemus-Paiz also said that she believed the school’s demolition would do little to stanch the flow of visitors. “As long as the name stands — which it should — people are going to keep coming.”
In April, the 20th anniversary of the attack, in which two students armed with guns and explosives killed 12 students and a teacher, was a reminder of that. It had been planned as a time for prayers and memorials, but instead hundreds of schools in Colorado were closed as authorities frantically searched for Sol Pais, an armed 18-year-old woman who law enforcement officials said was infatuated with the massacre, made threats and had traveled to the state from Florida.
The school was extensively renovated after 1999 and is now protected like a fortress. It has cameras, doors that lock remotely, security monitoring 24 hours a day.
“At some point we have to stop being the poster child for school shootings around the country,” McDonald said. “I think it’s time.”