Today marks a month since the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six educators were fatally shot. Yesterday, residents gathered to discuss the fate of the school, and the reaction was mixed.

One parent said, "It's still going to be a horrible place with horrible memories. My wife and I are not going to walk into that school, as a school," while another pointed out, "I have two children who had everything taken from them. The Sandy Hook Elementary School is their school. It is not the world's school. It is not Newtown's school. We cannot pretend it never happened, but I am not prepared to ask my children to run and hide. You can't take away their school."

Others pointed out that the children's new school, the Chalk Hill school that was reopened for the children, was not perfect. The Courant reports, "Chalk Hill has two floors, unlike the one-story Sandy Hook. When students move chairs on the second floor, the sounds are jarring to children on the first floor, 'which is setting off a lot of triggers,' [parent Christine ] Wilford said."

Some of the suggestions, besides razing and reopening the school, were to make it "a park, a planetarium, a senior center, a memorial." The NY Times notes, "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."

One thing residents could agree on was keeping the children in the same school district and having a district in Sandy Hook. The selectwoman E. Patricia Llondra said, "It will take many, many months to do any kind of school project. We have very big decisions ahead of us. The goal is to bring our students home as soon as we can."