First Selectman Llodra added that while the new school is exciting, everyone “would trade in a minute this handsome new school for the more familiar and aged sandy hook school, built in the 50s, if we could just change the past”.
Advertisement
If there is any thing that deserves a fresh start, it is the community of Newton and the incoming fourth grade students attending Sandy Hook Elementary School – about 30 of them who were only in kindergarten at the original property when the shooting occurred.
The $50 million replacement for the school torn down after the December 2012 massacre was designed in a forest theme with the goal of being attractive, environmentally friendly, conducive to learning and, above all, safe. All that remains are two large concrete slabs containing dinosaur footprints that also sat outside the old building.
“We’re asking everyone to give us the space we need to focus entirely on teaching and learning when we return for our first day of school”, Superintendent Joseph Erardi, the town’s top school official, said. The new school will educate a little less than 400 students from prekindergarten through to the fourth grade.
“Once you got down to where the driveway opened up, there was a whole different feeling, at least for me”, Horan said. “It was done so respectfully and so tastefully”.
“Our job was to listen”, said Julia McFadden, associate principal of Svigals + Partners, lead architects on the project. The ground floor is elevated in an effort to make it harder to see inside of the classrooms from outside the building, and the new Sandy Hook Elementary School grounds has been landscaped to ensure that anyone who is approaching the school is clearly visible to all persons inside. Teachers can lock classroom doors and windows from the inside, and key cards are required at entrances and exits throughout the school.
Half of the school’s staff was there for the shootings, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza ran through the building with a Bushmaster XM15 assault rifle and killed 20 children ages 6 and 7 years old, as well as six school staff members.
Among those killed were 20 first-graders and six educators.
“It’s nice that the elementary school kids will come back home to Newtown”, Ms. Kuroski said.
The district will provide returning students and staff with special mental health resources to help them cope, Erardi said. But so far, she said, teachers, parents and students who have toured the new building have been smiling.
The emotions surrounding the site of the former school are just still to much for them to bear.
Advertisement
Llodra said that despite the new school’s “birth” from tragedy, the school will be a place of love, laughter and learning.
