No one should envy the civic leaders of Newtown, Conn., as they attempt to bring order and transparency to distributing most of the $15 million in donations that has poured into town since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 20 children and six adults last December. The money was given through 40 ad hoc groups, many of them pursuing separate causes from helping families to building a local memorial, even an angel atop the town flagpole.
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Town officials have wisely been listening to warnings from veterans of earlier tragedies — including the Columbine, Aurora and Virginia Tech shootings and the Sept. 11 atrocities — that there will be no easy way to please everyone. "They all said, 'You need thick-skinned people, because this will be a thankless job,' " Newtown's second selectman, William Rodgers, told The Times's Peter Applebome. Mr. Rodgers is also director of the Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation that was created to disburse more than $10 million.
The task is one of the post-mortem burdens of communities raked by violence and death tolls that stir an outpouring of charity from a shocked nation. It has become such a repeated American phenomenon that a group of families and survivors of earlier mass tragedies is proposing creation of a National Compassion Fund.
The goal is to assure that money is distributed under a transparent protocol focused on wounded families, so that money is not diverted to extraneous causes. In the past, the heartbreak of lives lost has been compounded by public quarreling over donations. Outside adjudicators have been asked to play Solomon in such complex issues as the price of stress disorders stretching across years.
The Newtown foundation aims to emphasize local input and the advice of a distribution committee dedicated to public disclosure. Mr. Rodgers promises a "measured and incremental" approach. But he's been warned that the fight to return to normalcy is "never over," in the words of Frank DeAngelis, still the Columbine High School principal 14 years after that shooting massacre. "Newtown and Sandy Hook will have to redefine what normal is."
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