# $50M to rebuild Newtown? Seriously? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 15, 2013, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338 "2013-10-15T19:46:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pkbites](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pkbites/32/204_2.png) [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2013, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/21 "2013-10-16T16:47:13Z")
They did the same horseshit here in Milwaukee after the Jeffrey Dahmer thing. Tore down a perfectly good house because “something bad” had happened in it. To me it just seems on par with superstition. There are people who are in the market for a house that wouldn’t buy a specific one because the previous owner died of a heart attack in the his bed? It’s the same kind of thinking and it’s stupid! Do they tear down a highway everytime someone dies in a terrible traffic accident? If it was my tax money being spent in Newtown I’d be pissed! ---
**Author:** ![handsomeharry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9c0ed/32.png) [@handsomeharry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handsomeharry)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2013, 11:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/22 "2013-10-24T11:51:04Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > This is the second time I’ve seen the claim here that the Red Lake shooting “disappeared from the news.” What are you talking about? I was 1,300 miles away and clearly recall a series of stories in my area media. As far as I know, everything newsworthy was covered. What more do you want? Hey, man-the pattern’s right there! Just like the inner city white-on-white violence that THE MAN covered up about that Abe Lincoln thing in Washington DC! How much have you read about that lately? If there is anything about it, it’s jammed in that back pages. How much more do you need??? ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/23 "2013-10-26T04:41:04Z")
I don’t see why they couldn’t redo the entrance and tear out a few walls so as to redesign the areas where the massacre took place. Tearing it to the ground seems the definition of excessive. ---
**Author:** ![knel3030](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecae2f/32.png) [@knel3030](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/knel3030)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 9:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/24 "2013-10-26T09:49:01Z")
Its a ritual of destruction and renewal, symbolically cleansing a place of its negative history. In a more homogenouslyreligious culture, or without a money genie, they’d just have a guy ina robe walk through chanting and splashing holy water or some crap around. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/25 "2013-10-26T12:59:14Z")
> [@knel3030](#): > > Its a ritual of destruction and renewal, symbolically cleansing a place of its negative history. > In a more homogenouslyreligious culture, or without a money genie, they’d just have a guy ina robe walk through chanting and splashing holy water or some crap around. I think that understates the nature of the issue. It’s fair not to ask this year’s kindergarten class to set in the same first grade class next year where X number of kids were massacred. That would have a psychological effect on adults, let alone little kids. You can’t just clean up and then ask teachers, administrators, and children to go on like nothing happened. But likewise, demolishing a perfectly good building is too much. If it absolutely cannot be reopened, why not sell the school for office space and use that money to rebuild down the road (hopefully at a cost of far less than $50 million). ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/26 "2013-10-26T13:03:36Z")
I’m not sure who is going to pay to set up an office there. And selling that the school (or its components) may just feel distasteful to the people there. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/27 "2013-10-26T13:14:26Z")
> [@Bob's Zombie](#): > > I’m not sure who is going to pay to set up an office there. And selling that the school (or its components) may just feel distasteful to the people there. Fair enough. But surely there is some more productive use for the building than demolishing it. It seems like excessive waste. I want to be sensitive to those parents as well, but not $50M worth of sensitivity. ---
**Author:** ![Antigen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/848f3c/32.png) [@Antigen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antigen)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/28 "2013-10-26T13:54:41Z")
> [@pkbites](#): > > There are people who are in the market for a house that wouldn’t buy a specific one because the previous owner died of a heart attack in the his bed? It’s the same kind of thinking and it’s stupid! Do they tear down a highway everytime someone dies in a terrible traffic accident? To be fair, a heart attack isn’t quite the same as a horrible gruesome murder. And we’re not talking about someone buying a house. I can understand the difficulty involved in sending small children back into a building where they saw their friends killed. There’s got to be a whole lot of post-traumatic stress involved. I know I’d have a hard time sitting in a classroom and learning if I could look over at the doorway and remember a shooter standing there. Still, I’m not sure that tearing down the school and pulverizing it is the answer here. Maybe a remodel would be enough, to make it look different inside and keep the classrooms from triggering terrible memories in those kids. But I’m not an expert. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/29 "2013-10-26T14:15:27Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > But surely there is some more productive use for the building than demolishing it. It seems like excessive waste. In a way it’s overkill, but I can also understand why they went about it this way. I can’t find much fault with them for doing so. > [@](#): > > I want to be sensitive to those parents as well, but not $50M worth of sensitivity. I think if you’re going to be sensitive to people trying to recover from a horrible tragedy, you probably shouldn’t put a price tag on the sensitivity. I don’t know how they arrived at the final dollar figure but I’ll assume they chose a course of action and decided to keep the costs as low as they reasonably could. ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/30 "2013-10-26T15:10:32Z")
> [@Bob's Zombie](#): > > I think if you’re going to be sensitive to people trying to recover from a horrible tragedy, you probably shouldn’t put a price tag on the sensitivity. What if it had cost $500 million? $5 billion? $50 billion? Would you say the price tag we should put on our sensitivity in this case should be less than fifty billion dollars? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/31 "2013-10-26T15:45:06Z")
I don’t really understand the American mentality here. I mean, I’ve eaten in restaurants and coffee shops that have been hit by suicide bombings - mostly, they just cleaned up, renovated a bit and opened again as quickly as possible. To do otherwise would have been admitting defeat. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2013, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/32 "2013-10-26T16:54:39Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > To do otherwise would have been admitting defeat. We accept defeat all the time, and just call it victory. Terrorists induce the government to infringe upon our rights? Victory! Can’t find ObL? Attack another country. Mission Accomplished! I think that we all Want To Do Something, but doing something is hard; or at least inconvenient. Dead kids are a sad thing to think about. We can’t just say ‘This is sad. Bad things happen in the world. We can try to make them not happen, but we must keep moving.’ We have to go to extremes to make it seem like they never happened, and/or we must build a memorial to make sure everyone remembers. Repairing damage and putting up a plaque is enough; but we’re afraid of ghosts. I don’t like this part of our culture. JFK has been dead for 50 years, and yet every year we’re treated to remembrances and maudlin programming. The 2001 attacks were a dozen years ago, but we have to be reminded every year. It’s not that I don’t care; I do. But I am perfectly capable of remembering history on my own, and I don’t need people telling me how I must feel. It’s OK to remember tragedies. It’s silly and wasteful to raze a school because a tragedy happened there. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2013, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/33 "2013-10-27T22:26:36Z")
> [@Bob's Zombie](#): > > I think if you’re going to be sensitive to people trying to recover from a horrible tragedy, you probably shouldn’t put a price tag on the sensitivity. I don’t know how they arrived at the final dollar figure but I’ll assume they chose a course of action and decided to keep the costs as low as they reasonably could. Of course you put a price tag on sensitivity. If an employee’s spouse dies, you might give him a couple of weeks off of work to mourn. You wouldn’t give him 10 years off. If I was in charge of the school system, I would listen to the parents and be open to reasonable accommodations but tearing a perfectly good building to the ground and building a new one on the same spot, especially at a cost of $50 million, isn’t reasonable. This is an elementary school, right? Most university buildings don’t cost anywhere near that, and the land is already owned, so that is all in building materials and labor. Is there a link somewhere on line to any mock ups of this new palatial school? ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2013, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/34 "2013-10-27T22:31:18Z")
Missed the edit window: The average cost of a 45,000 sq. ft. elementary school in the U.S., using union labor, is $7.4 million. [http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/elementary-school/](http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/elementary-school/) ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2013, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/35 "2013-10-28T14:00:51Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > Of course you put a price tag on sensitivity. If an employee’s spouse dies, you might give him a couple of weeks off of work to mourn. You wouldn’t give him 10 years off. But that’s going to be predetermined in most cases. It’s governed by laws and union agreements. This isn’t. So the appropriate thing to do is look at some options and choose one based on all the criteria (yes, including cost)- not say “whoa, I’m sympathetic, but not that sympathetic!” > [@](#): > > If I was in charge of the school system, I would listen to the parents and be open to reasonable accommodations but tearing a perfectly good building to the ground and building a new one on the same spot, especially at a cost of $50 million, isn’t reasonable. In other words you’d reject money the state of Connecticut has already set aside for this exact purpose because you feel the project costs too much? Because _again_, the local school system is not paying for it. [The state of Connecticut made $50 million available to them to build the new school.](http://www.wbur.org/npr/229797855/the-votes-are-in-sandy-hook-elementary-will-be-torn-down) > [@Alessan](#): > > I don’t really understand the American mentality here. I mean, I’ve eaten in restaurants and coffee shops that have been hit by suicide bombings - mostly, they just cleaned up, renovated a bit and opened again as quickly as possible. To do otherwise would have been admitting defeat. Thanks to the Bush administration it seems to me that this is mostly nonsense. Nothing personal, and I don’t object to the cleaning up and going on as things are. You don’t have to tear everything down and start over. But the whole “we have to guess their intentions and do the opposite of what we think they want!” process is ludicrous. And this wasn’t a terrorist attack anyway. It was a random psychotic assault on small children, so there’s no ideological point to make and there’s not much to be gained by making preteens go back to a building where a few dozens of their classmates were killed. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2013, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/36 "2013-10-28T14:34:15Z")
Well, the Amish community did a similar thing. Of course, they probably didn’t spend so much. > [@](#): > > The West Nickel Mines School was demolished the following week, on 12 October 2006.[29] The site was left as a quiet pasture.[30] The New Hope School was built at a different location, near the original site. It opened on 2 April 2007, precisely six months after the shooting.[31] The new school was intentionally built as “different” as possible from the original, including the style of the flooring. Anyway, just think of it is a jobs program. $50M buys a lot of economic development. ---
**Author:** ![Running\_with\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a183cd/32.png) [@Running\_with\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Running_with_Scissors)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2013, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/37 "2013-10-28T15:49:59Z")
> [@Bob's Zombie](#): > > The state of Connecticut made $50 million available to them to build the new school. This is another disturbing fact. Wow, Connecticut must have no other problems, if they can afford to spend $50MM to make some parents feel a little better. I’m reminded of [this scene](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZARAldXlSyA&t=2m17s) from Dave. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2013, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338/38 "2013-10-28T16:02:44Z")
> [@Running\_with\_Scissors](#): > > This is another disturbing fact. Wow, Connecticut must have no other problems, if they can afford to spend $50MM to make some parents feel a little better. It’s a wealthy state in the wealthy United States. Whether or not they should, it’s not a surprise they can find $50 million to set aside. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/50m-to-rebuild-newtown-seriously/671338.md?page=1)