Editorial

Allowing high school building to remain right choice

Thursday, July 25, 2019

After polling nearly 7,000 patrons, Columbine High School, Jeffco Public Schools Superintendent Jason Glass announced that there isn’t enough support to tear down and rebuild Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

The patrons are right.

We remember how things got slowly back to normal after the September 11 attacks; perhaps too quickly. We had hoped society might take more time for reflection and self-examination before returning to the mundane tasks of every day life and conflicts over relatively minor issues.

Not long after the dust settled from the collapse of the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush and Mayor Rudy Giuliani urged us to go to a show, go shopping and carry on with our normal lives.

Otherwise, it was said, the terrorists had won.

The same could be said for the twisted young men who massacred schoolmates and others in the 1999 massacre, and those who are somehow drawn to the macabre.

The Columbine proposal, which would have maintained the school’s name and mascot, would have cost taxpayers $70 million.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents were against demolishing and rebuilding the school, and 55% said the proposal was “not really important” or “not important at all.”

Visiting the school is understandably traumatic for someone who experienced the 1999 attack first hand, or someone who lost a loved one there.

But destroying the physical building wouldn’t erase the memory, and heal the psychological damage. Returning the facility to its original purpose, with common-sense security measures already in place and more planned, is the best course of action.

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