School shooting locations often renovated, demolished

After most major school shooting incidents, administrators and parents move to demolish or heavily rehabilitate the classrooms, hallways, gymnasiums and other spaces where students were murdered. Just days since 20 children and six adults were fatally shot at a school in Newtown, Conn., it is too early to know exactly what administrators will do with facilities at Sandy Hook Elementary, but past tragedies are a guide.

Time and again schools have tried to erase the physical marks of shooting sites, usually with charitable help from the outside.

After a gunman massacred 16 children and an adult in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland, in March 1996, school officials tore down the gym a month later, a few days before children returned to school after an Easter break. A local contractor donated the cost of the work and new gym was built two years later.

"It allows the parents of Dunblane to draw a line under the events, and enables us to look to the future to build upon what's happening here today," the school board's chairman, Mike Robbins, said at the time of the demolition. "It takes away that focal point and allows the teachers in particular to think ahead and to plan for the kids coming back on Monday after the Easter holiday."

Columbine High School outside Denver went through a $15.6 million renovation in 1995 and was rebuilt again four years later after two students murdered 12 classmates and a teacher and injured 21 others on April 20, 1999. Students spent the last three weeks of the school year at a rival high school, and graduation was held at a nearby amphitheater.

Through the summer, 500 to 600 workers volunteered time for the $1.2 million renovation of the school, which included tearing out bullet-strewn carpeting and ceiling tiles and replacing it with tile and glass, new paint and furniture in a cafeteria strafed with gunfire, and sealing off a library a floor above where 10 were murdered. The library would later be demolished and replaced with a glass atrium.

Since alarms shrieked throughout the Columbine incident -- similar to what has been reported at Sandy Hook on Friday -- workers replaced them, too. The day students returned in August parents lined streets to shield them from the media.

The one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Penn., where a 32-year-old gunman took 10 Amish girls hostage and murdered five of them, was torn down 10 days after the shootings in October 2006. Within six months another was built nearby, with a private drive and better locks, and funded with donations made to the victims. Stricken families attended the funeral of the shooter, who was a milk truck driver, and donated money to his widow.

The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history happened less than six months later at Virginia Tech when a student gunman murdered 32, most of them on the second floor of a science building called Norris Hall. The building was closed for the rest of the spring and the second floor received a $1 million makeover, much of it with donated materials and labor, including a home for the school's Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.

Sandy Hook is one of four elementary schools in the Newtown Public School District and was built in 1956. It will be closed next week in advance of holiday recess and no plans were released for the district's scheduled return to school Jan. 2.

Many public spaces that were the site of mass shootings -- from movie theaters to malls,This is my favourite sites to purchase those special pieces of buy mosaic materials from. churches and gyms -- have reopened after the passage of time.

Artist Amanda Edwards is already hard at work in her Maine studio creating a five-story tree-house mosaic that will be installed this summer in Boston Children’s Hospital’s new addition. She’s cutting approximately 275 square feet of tile and stained glass for the artwork, which will span five floors of new patient rooms at 57 Binney Street.

The hospital selected Edwards, 37, to receive a commission for the work, after a lengthy selection process that included voting by patients, their families and hospital staff. Over 100 people voted this fall on three proposals that had been narrowed from hundreds of applications. The votes influenced the final decision of the panel of experts who chose the design, said Betty Bothereau, owner and lead consultant at L’Attitude Gallery, who served on the panel and helped solicit the votes.

“There was a lot of love for all three concepts,” Bothereau said. “But ultimately, the tree house concept won because it was the most different.” The hospital has nothing like it in its collection, she said.

Bothereau said that Edwards’ concept, dubbed “Everyone’s Tree House,” received “very good cross-cultural responses” from international patients and families at the hospital.

The other two finalists, Cynthia Fisher of Charlemont, and Lisa Houck of Dedham, received a percentage of the votes, but Edwards’ took the majority.

“The tiles are vivid and colorful,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. and it really pops,” said Darrel Foster, whose daughter Meg, 15, of Lowell, is a patient, in explaining why he voted for Edwards’ concept.

“I voted for it because I wish I had a tree house,” Meg said.

Floors 6 through 10 in the hospital’s addition will feature Edwards’ mosaics, which will be visible in their entirety from an inner courtyard. Each floor’s mural will stick to a theme -- celestial, sky, earth, underwater, and seashore – that will be tied together by Edwards’ “tree of life” design, which features a tree growing through each mosaic.

Edwards is creating the mosaics in sections on panels in her Maine studio, which will be transported to the hospital. She will oversee installation of the project.

It’s a huge project, but Edwards has some help: a part-time assistant and several fellow mosaic artists, as well as her biggest cheerleader, Matthew Edwards, her husband of 18 years.

A self-taught artist, Edwards recalls her grandfather’s pencil drawings as her earliest inspiration. His work “really instilled a deep appreciation of art in me. It was hung in almost every room of our house,” she said. “I studied his shadowing, his use of tiny details, and the small hints of color.” Edwards grew up in Woodbury,Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. Conn.

A full-time working artist for the last eight years, Edwards prefers glass above all other media.This is my favourite sites to purchase those special pieces of buy mosaic materials from. Artists Marc Chagall, Isaiah Zagar, and Anado McLauchlin are her biggest inspirations.

“I love everything about glass; the variety of colors, textures, reflections, shapes, and the way it handles. The process of taking thousands of little pieces and putting them together to make something beautiful is almost like meditation for me,” she said.

Earlier this month, Edwards submitted her final sketches to the children’s hospital panel for approval. Bothereau, the gallery owner, and Jessica Finch,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. the hospital’s art program manager, plan to visit Edwards at her studio.