A move is on to tear down the one-story Robb Elementary School in Ulvade, Texas, scene of a mass shooting late last month resulting in the deaths of 19 students and two teachers.
Officials with the Consolidated Independent School District report they have received comments from parents and district residents saying that a return to the building for the students this fall might be too traumatic.
Interestingly, leveling the structure, which was built in 1955, aligns with an analysis compiled last year by the Texas Association of School Boards suggesting that the facility should be demolished sometime in the next ten years.
The Robb school is one of only ten schools in a district with around 4,100 students.
If the building really is leveled, it will follow in the path of other schools that have been the scenes of horrific shootings and subsequently done away with. The Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, was demolished in early 2013, several months after 20 children and half a dozen teachers were killed by a shooter.
A new $50 million school, paid for primarily through state funds, was built and ready for students for the fall semester of 2016.
Similarly, the library space at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where ten students were killed in the spring of 1999, was subsequently demolished and replaced with a nearly 14,000 square foot facility two years later called the Hope Library.
Funding to build a new school in Uvalde could come through a grant from the School Emergency Response to Violence program via the federal Department of Education, which has supported previous post-shooting new school building projects.
By Garry Boulard
