By RAY RIVERA
NEWTOWN, Conn. — Many people here still remember the huge green footprints that once led up to the front entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Children were told that they had been left by the Jolly Green Giant.
That was one of the many fond memories of the school, memories that connect families and generations. Now, as this community of 27,000 struggles to recover from a mass shooting that killed 20 first graders and six staff members at the school, public officials and residents have begun preparing for the painful decision over what to do with the building.
Residents packed into the auditorium of Newtown High School on Sunday afternoon for the first of what might be several meetings to discuss the school’s future. Opinions varied sharply about whether to reopen the school, renovate it, turn it into a shrine or a park, or raze it.
Stephanie Carson, who has a son who was at the school on Dec. 14, the day of the shooting, said it should be knocked down.
“I cannot ask my son or any of the people at the school to ever walk back into that building, and he has asked to never go back,” she said. “I know that there are children who were there who have said they would like to go back to Sandy Hook. However, the reality is we have to be so careful. Even walking down the halls, the children become so scared at any unusual sound. I don’t see how it would be possible.”
A month after the shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary remains a crime scene. Few have been allowed past the police cars and barricades still guarding the roadway and into the building where Adam Lanza, for reasons still unknown, went on a horrifying killing spree before fatally shooting himself.
Earlier this month, the school’s 400 students began attending a school that had been shuttered in nearby Monroe, Conn. That building was reopened after the hallways and classrooms were remade to resemble the ones they had left behind.
Audra Barth, the mother of a third grader and a first grader at Sandy Hook, was among the parents who said closing the school would further rob children who had already lost so much.
“My children have had everything taken away from them,” she said. Referring to the numerous gifts, including candy, that had been donated since the shooting, she added, “Chocolate is great, but they need their school.”
If there was a unifying theme among parents and others in Sunday’s comments, it was that the children should be kept together, at least for the next several years, and not split apart into separate schools. The concerns, raised by many of the parents who spoke, stemmed from discussions last year — before the shooting — in which school officials proposed closing down an elementary school and shuffling the district. E. Patricia Llodra, Newtown’s first selectwoman, said that proposal was no longer being considered.
Discussions over the school building’s fate seemed to be the latest step in the community’s slow path to recovery, coming after the Public Works Department began picking up the bounty of flowers, teddy bears, paper angels and other tributes that had accumulated on the roadsides around the school.
More meetings will come when the town begins looking at how to honor the victims with a permanent memorial.
Ideas on Sunday included turning the school into a planetarium where children could gaze at the stars and converting it into a center for peace education.
Newtown is the latest in a growing list of communities that have been thrust into making such a choice.
After two students killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999, that community ultimately decided to keep that school open. Some $2.6 million, much of it donated, was spent on renovations that included turning the library, where the gunmen ended their rampage, into a glass atrium with a canopy of evergreens and aspens painted on the ceilings.
At Virginia Tech, where 32 people were gunned down by a student in April 2007, the building where 30 of the killings occurred was turned into the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.
Mergim Bajraliu, 17, a senior at Newtown High School who attended Sandy Hook Elementary and whose sister, a fourth grader, was there the day of the shooting, urged the town to follow the examples of Columbine and Virginia Tech.
“Despite everything that happened to my sister, both her and I have amazing memories of that school,” he said on Sunday, recalling sack races and visits to the nearby firehouse. “I think children in the future deserve the same youthful memories I have.”
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