How do you make a school feel familiar, but not triggering, after it was the site of a mass shooting? How do you honor those lost, without forcing those who survived to relive the tragedy?
These are the questions that Nashville’s Covenant School has been grappling with as it redesigned its space after a shooting in March 2023 left three children and three adults dead.
Paige Pfleger WPLN NewsIn the weeks following the shooting, people from all around the country sent paper cranes to the Covenant School as a symbol of hope and healing.
During a press tour, kids attending summer camp are excitedly walking in a line to get to the gym for snack time. They pass under hundreds of colorful paper cranes dangling from the ceiling – one for each kid who was at school the day of the shooting.
Head of the Covenant School Trudy Waters says the fact that a tragedy happened here is unavoidable. But they’ve worked hard to make sure the new space has sitting areas and quiet corners for teachers or students who might be having a hard time.
“We don’t want to stop moving forward and living,” she told WPLN News. “So we have to figure out how to how to live with it.”
This redesign was the school’s way of trying to fill the space with hope and playfulness.
Paige Pfleger WPLN NewsThere are rainbows of color in nearly every room — a nod to the rainbow that appeared over the church on the first day families gathered after the shooting.
“It feels like a new chapter,” she says. “Same book, but the next chapter.”
And the work isn’t over. She says the school and the community will continue trying to walk the fine line between remembering and starting anew.
Paige Pfleger WPLN NewsCovenant students collaborated on a painting that hangs on the second floor of the school. It includes odes to the six lives lost, including headmaster Katherine Koonce, who used to teach students lessons using her cat as a character.
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