The children who escaped last month’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut are returning to classes on Thursday at a refurbished school renamed after their old one, school officials said Wednesday.

School officials are preparing for droves of anxious parents to join the fleet of buses carting children to a disused middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe. Chalk Hill Middle School, closed about a year-and-a-half ago, has been hastily refurbished in the three weeks since the December 14 attack and renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School.