Nearly a month after the tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas (May 24) — that killed 19 children and two teachers — officials are now announcing the school’s demolition.
On Tuesday (June 21), Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin revealed during a City Council meeting that they planned to raze the building. McLaughlin did not provide a timeline or more specifics to this plan.
“My understanding – and I had this discussion with the superintendent – that school will be demolished,” he stated. “You can never ask a child to go back or a teacher to go back in that school ever.”
Sandy Hook Elementary School began demolition a year after a gunman killed 20 students and six adults. With similar sentiments to Uvalde, a local psychiatrist at the time said: “They don’t want to go back, and vehemently so. For some, it was just too overwhelming to go into that space again without becoming unhinged. You can’t ask people to bear something that is, for them, unbearable.”
The 550 students who attended Robb Elementary School are reportedly set to be relocated this fall, split between two other schools in Uvalde. Officials did previously share their plan to rebuild a new school in the future.
The Robb Elementary School shooting is the deadliest in Texas history. Most recently, during testimony in front of a special Texas Senate committee in Austin on Tuesday (June 21), Steven McCraw, the director of the state’s Department of Public Safety, called the response of the police officers on the scene of the mass shooting an “abject failure.”
