Panel: Tear down, rebuild Sandy Hook school

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- A task force of elected officials has recommended tearing down the elementary school where 20 first-graders and six educators were shot dead in December and rebuilding on the site.

The group of 28 Newtown elected officials voted unanimously Friday for a plan to construct a new building on the property where the existing Sandy Hook Elementary School is located. The proposal now goes to the local school board and ultimately before voters.

Parent Daniel Krauss, whose daughter is a second-grader, said he was pleased. "It's been a place for learning, for kids to grow up and it's going to go back to that," he said after attending the meeting at the Newtown Municipal Center.

Krauss' daughter is among the 430 surviving students attending a renovated school renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School in a neighboring town.

Peter Barresi spoke out against abandoning the current school property. His son is a first-grader whose classroom was on the other side of the school from where the shootings happened.

Barresi said he worried that if a new school was built elsewhere, "We didn't just lose 20 children and six adults, we're letting him [gunman Adam Lanza] take the building too."

The Sandy Hook School Building Task Force had narrowed a list of choices to renovating or rebuilding on the school site or building a new school on property down the street. A study found building a new school on the existing site would cost $57 million.

If all goes well, officials said construction could begin next spring and the new building could open in January 2016.

Sandy Hook Elementary School hasn't housed students since the killings. Some town residents said the school should be torn down because they couldn't imagine sending children back there. Last week, several teachers told the task force that they didn't want to return to the property.