BREAKING: Shooting at Conn. Elementary School

[Duchess]

The Sandy Hook kids have returned to school.


Twenty days after the massacre that left 20 first graders and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, plunging a rural New England town and the nation into grief, classes resumed on Thursday for the more than 400 students who lived through the harrowing assault.

Across Newtown's sprawling Sandy Hook neighborhood where the December 14 attack took place, children bundled in heavy winter coats boarded buses decked in green and white ribbons, their school colors, for the seven-mile journey to their new school.

Chalk Hill Middle School, an unused school in the neighboring town of Monroe, was refurbished specifically for the students from Newtown, and now bears a new but familiar name - Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Students on packed buses waved at clusters of photographers and TV cameras gathered at street corners along the bus route. Heightened security measures meant media was kept well away, but from a small plane above the new school, children getting off buses were seen running, hopping and skipping through the doors.

A steady stream of parents' cars were seen pulling up to drop students off at the main entrance, where they were greeted by a dark-suited official.

Anca Roberto, 35, put her 5-year-old daughter, a kindergartner, on the bus not far from the old Sandy Hook school, which remains a bullet-riddled crime scene closed to everyone but police.

Roberto said she had been nervous about the return to school until Wednesday, when she and her daughter attended an open house at the new location. Her daughter was thrilled to find her cubby intact, moved from the old school, and she "screeched" when she saw her friends.

The students "hugged, and they played and they were just kids," Roberto said. "The teachers were just amazing."

Story