We need to preserve school shooting sites

In 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, I traveled there as part of a team helping the government revise school history curricula. At the national memorial in the capital city of Kigali, we saw clothing, weapons, and video testimonials documenting the murder of 800,000 people over a span of 100 days.

But the thing that really stuck with me was a site we visited outside of town, where victims had sought refuge in a school. Their killers set it on fire and burned them to death. And when the genocide was over, officials decided to preserve the site rather than bulldoze it.

We walked through the ruined shell of the school and saw everything that was still inside of it: charred desks and chairs, a blackboard, and — yes — human remains. That made a more lasting impression than any museum or memorial could.

I thought about that preserved space again recently, as crews began demolishing the site of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla. I understand the desire to remove the building, where 14 students and three teachers were killed. It is a reminder of the unspeakable horror that gun violence has visited upon that community and upon our nation writ large.

But that’s precisely why I wish we could preserve it. Ditto for the school shooting sites in Uvalde, Texas, and Newtown, Conn.

Tearing them down lets us look away from the real atrocity of American gun violence, which took nearly 50,000 lives in 2023. And it delays the day when we might do something real to stop it.

Every time a school shooting happens, we say: Not again. No more. But there is always more. Our attention spans are short, and the truth of what happened is too terrible to contemplate.

In Parkland, however, that truth has been on display for nearly six years. The victims died in the former freshman building, which was preserved as a crime scene while the gunman was on trial. Jurors walked through the building and saw blood stains and broken glass. They also saw remnants of flowers and balloons, grim reminders that the massacre took place on Valentine’s Day.

The rest of us should see that, too. But we won’t, because the building is coming down.

Ditto for the Robb School in Uvalde, where officials are planning to demolish the building where 21 people were murdered in 2022. “We could never ask a child to go back, or a teacher to go back into that school ever,” the city’s mayor said.

He’s right, of course: We shouldn’t retain the building as an active school, which would require victims of the tragedy to return there. I just wish that it remained open to others, so we could all witness what Uvalde experienced on that awful day.

In Parkland, a man who lost his 14-year-old son said he was glad the shooting site had been preserved up until now. That allowed officials — including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona — to visit it, and see the horror for themselves.

Another father of a victim said his wife had found meaning in the tragedy by escorting visitors through the site. He also said that his son — whose sister was murdered in the attack — feared that people would forget it when the building came down.

I was pleased to learn that Parkland will erect a permanent memorial to the victims on a bucolic site on the outskirts of town. Similarly, Sandy Hook chose a wooded setting for its own memorial to the 20 children and six adults gunned down at its school in 2012.

The Sandy Hook school itself is long gone, replaced by a beautiful new building filled with color and natural light. Like the memorial, it’s a lovely way to honor the victims of the tragedy.

Yet as one of my own teachers once told me, all acts of remembering are also acts of forgetting. By choosing to commemorate these tragedies in peaceful and pastoral places, we bury the violence and brutality at their core.

By choosing to commemorate these tragedies in peaceful and pastoral places, we bury the violence and brutality at their core.

A list of names set against a water pool creates a very different effect than a classroom sprayed with bullet holes. We need to see both.

Several years ago, my wife and I visited the site of the former Nazi death camp at Dachau. We saw a giant crematorium, which seemed to stare back at us in mute testimony to the murdered. At Auschwitz, where the largest number of Holocaust victims perished, you can physically enter a gas chamber.

These grisly remnants take nothing away from the beautiful memorials to the Holocaust around the world. But they add a necessary note of reality to a horror that we would all prefer to ignore. We must not — and we cannot — avert our eyes. Not again. No more.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn” (with illustrations by cartoonist Signe Wilkinson) and eight other books.