West Nickel Mines Amish School: unique story of forgiveness and healing – The Mainstream Online

Photo provided by Steven NoltNew Hope Amish School was completed six months after the shooting occurred.

West Nickel Mines Amish School: unique story of forgiveness and healing

When a shooting in a one-room Amish school house inPennsylvania on Oct. 6, 2006 killed five girls and injured five more, the townof West Nickel Mines reacted to the tragedy with a forgiveness, humility andunity rarely seen, especially in the aftermath of a school shooting. Therebuilt school, called New Hope, is a symbol of the values shared by the Amishand their broader Anabaptist community.

One week after the shooting, while members of the community were delivering food to the shooters family, several pupils and their families returned to the school building to retrieve any personal items left behind during the tragedy. Emergency workers had cleaned up the scene as much as possible, but there were bullet holes and broken windows, said Steven Nolt, professor of Anabaptist Studies at Elizabethtown College, in an email interview.

At 10:45 a.m., which was when the shooting had occurred, several boys rang the school bell to mark the moment before they had left the school. The building was demolished soon thereafter.

Soon was just six days later. The school building wasdemolished in the early morning of Oct. 12, 2006 by a non-Amish contractor witha backhoe in less than thirty minutes.The demolition occurred in the darkness just before dawn to preventmedia from capturing pictures of it, said Donald Kraybill, coauthor of a bookof the West Nickel Mines Shooting, in an email interview. By 8 a.m. the last ofthe remains from the school had been removed and the site of the buildingleveled.

The site was converted back to pasture ground (thebuilding had been constructed in 1976 on the edge of a cow pasture). Within twoweeks after the incident, the school then resumed classes in a shop provided byone of the local Amish families. While the students met in the shop building,their parents began planning a fresh site and building for their New HopeSchool.

There was concern that the new school would attract a lotof media attention, which the Nickel Mines community did not want, Noltexplained. These concerns were fueled by the aftermath of the shooting, whenhundreds of reporters and media crews descended on the town of West NickelMines

The community also wanted the new building to reduce therecurrence of traumatic memories for survivors of the shooting. None of thefamilies wanted to send their children back to a building where they hadexperienced extreme violence and trauma, so the decision to demolish the schooland reconstruct elsewhere was obvious, according to Kraybill.

With these concerns and goals, the parents on the schoolboard took the initiative to begin plans for the construction of the newschool.

Under normal circumstances, management decisions for Amishschools are made by their school board, composed of three to five fathers ofthe students. These fathers rotate through the school board as terms arecompleted and new members are elected.

The circumstances are, indeed, unusual: a school board oftraumatized victims fathers who must now plan and build a new school for thechildren who escaped. As Nolt explained, each school board member at WestNickel Mines had at least one child impacted by the shooting.

But, the responsibility was theirs. In a legal sense theschool board owns the school as trustees. Amish schools are not owned by theAmish church, Nolt said. Amish schools are built and maintained by thefamilies in a particular neighborhood for their children, with the day-to-dayupkeep left in the hands of the school board.

So, it was the parents on the school board who took theinitiative. By virtue of their appointment by the community, members of theschool board have wide-ranging authority to make decisions in the best interestof the school, Kraybill said. However, due to the unusual circumstances Isuspect the school board consulted the bishops and pastors in the threecongregational districts whose children attended the school.

One of the more serious responsibilities in dealing with buildings that have had a school shooting is obtaining project funding. For the Amish, this reconstruction funding was orchestrated out of public sight as the Amish prefer. In the days and weeks after the shooting a number of people contacted me wanting to donate for the construction of a new school, said Herman Bontrager in an email interview. Bontrager is a leader in the Mennonite church, which is another branch of Anabaptism similar to the Amish. Bontrager served as a liaison between media and the West Nickel Mines community in the aftermath of the shooting.

The response from the school committee was that they had enough funds to build the school and did not need any donations. They had donations from the Amish community and would use their donated labor and materials, which is typical for the construction of their new schools.

School funding is totally controlled by the school boardwith no intervention by government agencies. The only public influence overschool construction is zoning and land development approvals, Bontrager said.Fortunately, many Amish projects are small, simple, low cost and have minimalland-use impact. There are standard school design plans that have approval bypublic authorities, so the building process is usually quite routine.

Specific amounts related to the cost of the demolition ofthe old building and the construction of the new building could not beobtained. However, a total of $5 million was donated from around the world tocover the medical and rehabilitation costs for the five girls who were injuredduring the shooting, according to Kraybill.

The construction was then begun later that fall by anAmish contractor. The new building has the same dimensions and layout as theprevious building but in a different location relatively close to the originalschool, partially hidden behind a nearby hill to provide more privacy andsecurity.

All Amish schools in Lancaster are built to the samedimensions they have a standard building permit that is used and all schoolsare built with the same layout, Nolt said. However, the exterior of the newschool was different from the original because the style had changed between1976 and 2006/7.

That pattern likely helped the construction of New Hopeschool to be completed just six months after the shooting had occurred Classesbegan in the new building April of 2007.

Today, along the edge of the pasture where the West NickelMines school once stood, stand a row of trees planted by the families of thefive victims. Unmarked, these trees are recognized as a memorial only by thosewho know the history of the site. It is a silent, peaceful, humble memorialthat reflects the desires of the victims families, Kraybill said.

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