Peter Muckell could have kept his daughter at home on Tuesday, the first day of school in Newtown after the mass shooting of 20 first-grade pupils and six of their teachers.
“But what are you going to do? Keep them in a bubble?” said Muckell after accompanying eight-year-old Shannon to Hawley Elementary School. “That’s not an option for anybody… I just want her to get back to routine.”
“I didn’t ask her to be brave,” he added. “I just said, ‘I love you.’ She was fine. She was fine.”
Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza, 20, for reasons still unknown, carried out one of the worst school shootings in US history with a military-style semi-automatic rifle last Friday, remains a crime scene, sealed off by police. (Lanza also killed his mother, who owned the gun, as well as himself.)
But for 5,400 other elementary, middle school and high school students in Newtown, an affluent community well known for the high quality of its public education system, the last Monday of class before Christmas was like no other.
Many rode yellow school buses that bore green-and-white ribbons on their front grills.
“Those are the colors of Sandy Hook school,” explained Joan Baumgart of All-Star Transportation, which runs 50 school buses in Newtown. The bows, she said, had been hand-made the night before by the company’s owners and employees.
Police officers stood outside every local school, and some schools were ringed with yellow police tape to keep out the large number of news media that remain in Newtown, four days after the tragedy.
Hawley Elementary School, a 1920s building with a handsome cupola on its roof, always has a police officer on hand, given its location on trafficky Church Hill Road, 1.5 miles (2.5 miles) from its more modern Sandy Hook counterpart.
Some of its pupils, who attend kindergarten through fourth grade, smiled and waved to reporters as they arrived in buses. A few other kids came by foot with their parents, holding hands. None was seen walking alone.
One mother, who declined to give her name, told reporters her nine-year-old was feeling upbeat and “very happy to get back with his friends.
“It’s an important day,” the lad’s father added. “The town has been terrific. The school has been terrific. The police have been terrific.” Summing up his emotions, he said: “There are no words. Just tears.”
Hawley Elementary School is a few hundred yards (meters) from Saint Rose of Lima church, where the funeral of James Mattioli, 6, a slain Sandy Hill pupil with a passion for horses, was taking place as classes resumed.
Muckell, who runs a party rental business in Newton, told reporters how last Friday, upon hearing news of the Sandy Hook shooting, he opted to go to Hawley school himself to take Shannon home.
“She thought I picked her up because she had red eye,” he said.
Listening to the breaking news on the car radio, he said, Shannon “gasped” upon learning that children only a few years younger than herself had been victims of the kind of violence that usually targets adults.
Muckell, who hunts wild game with a bow and arrow but owns no firearms, said the Sandy Hook incident has reinforced his support for more stringent gun legislation.
“I just don’t get it with the assault rifles,” he said. “That’s what worries me… Are we all going to watch, literally, our kids get slaughtered before we do anything about this?”
In US shootings' wake, wary parents take kids back to class
