New Sandy Hook school reopens nearly 4 years after massacre
Old building where 26 died demolished
NEWTOWN, Conn. — The new Sandy Hook Elementary School, built to replace the one demolished after a massacre that took the lives of 20 children and six educators, features three courtyards, study spaces designed to look like treehouses and a moat-like rain garden.
Still, many would give anything to have the old building back.
“But, let me state unequivocally that we would trade in a minute this beautiful new school for the more familiar and ancient Sandy Hook school, built in the ’50s, if we could just change the past,” said Pat Llodra, the town’s first selectman.
The new 86,000-squarefoot school opened Friday for the first time to the media and the general public, containing no obvious memorials to the 26 people who died in December 2012, but officials said it was created with them in mind.
The $50 million replacement was built on the same property but not in the old footprint. All that remains are two large concrete slabs containing dinosaur footprints that also sat outside the old building.
Local officials hope allowing people to take a look this week will make for a “quiet, respectful, and appropriate opening” on Aug. 29, superintendent Joseph Erardi said.
Melisa Horan found touring the new school with her now sixth-grade son cathartic. He has aged out of the prekindergarten-to-fourthgrade school but wanted to see the replacement for his old school.
“Once you got down to where the driveway opened up, there was a whole different feeling, at least for me,” Ms. Horan said. “It was done so respectfully and so tastefully.”
Architects and engineers held seven workshops to gather community input, including “Kids Build” sessions with the students, whose drawings can be seen on the flags that line the driveway.
The school was designed, officials said, to be attractive, environmentally friendly, conducive to learning and, above all, safe.
Visitors will need to pass through a driveway gate with a video intercom, across a moat-like rain garden and past two police officers and a video monitoring system to get inside. Its ground floor is elevated, making it harder to see inside classrooms from the outside. All the doors and windows are bulletproof.
In the years since the massacre, Sandy Hook students have been attending school in neighboring Monroe, which renovated a previously closed elementary school after the shooting.
There will be about 390 students enrolled this fall, and 70 of those, all now fourth-graders, were students at the old school when the shooting occurred, Mr. Erardi said. About 35 of them were in the building at the time, but none witnessed the shootings, he said.