A panel of local officials has voted unanimously to tear down Sandy Hook elementary school – the site of a school shooting in which 20 children and six educators were killed – but rebuild on the site. Plans to erect a new school on the exact same spot have been welcomed by some parents in the town as a powerful statement that the community has not been broken by the tragedy.

"I think our message should be at that site that love can win over fear," said Steve Uhde, whose son is a Sandy Hook second-grader. Another Sandy Hook parent, Peter Barresi, said he was worried that if a new school were to be built at a different location: "We didn't just lose 20 children and six adults, we're letting him [the gunman, Adam Lanza] take the building too." Barresi's son attends the first grade and was on the other side of the school from where the shootings happened.

The vote was taken on Friday night by a task force of 28 local elected officials, called the Sandy Hook School Building Task Force. The result was unanimous and will now go to the local school board. It will ultimately have to be approved by residents at a referendum. The panel's recommendation pleased Daniel Krauss, whose daughter is a second-grader.

"It's been a place for learning, for kids to grow up and it's going to go back to that," he said, after attending the meeting at the Newtown Municipal Center.

The 430 surviving students are now attending a renovated school, renamed Sandy Hook Elementary School, in the neighboring town of Monroe. They are expected to remain there until a new school is built in Newtown. The task force had narrowed a list of choices to renovating or rebuilding on the school site or building a new school on property down the street. A study found that building a new school on the existing site would cost $57m. If all goes well, officials said construction could begin in the spring of next year and the new building could open in January 2016.

Plans under consideration call for a building with a shape that resembles homes and barns built in the town in the 1700s and 1800s and 26 glass cupolas on the roof with spires "pointed towards heaven", in remembrance of the 26 victims, according to a report compiled for the task force.

Sandy Hook Elementary School has not housed students since the killings. Some town residents said the school should be torn down, because they couldn't imagine sending children back there. Others favored renovating the school, with some saying that tearing it down would be a victory for evil.

Last week, several teachers told the task force that they didn't want to return to the property. Brian Engel, whose six-year-old daughter, Olivia, died in the 14 December shootings, also told the task force last week that he didn't want Olivia's younger brother to attend school in the place where she died.

Laura Roche, a member of the Sandy Hook School Task Force and vice-chairwoman of the local Board of Education, said it had been "very emotional and very hard" to come to a decision about the school's future. But she was pleased by the unanimous vote, a signal the panel was united. "We came together as 28, and I hope we can come together as a community to rebuild the spirit of our community and build the school together," she said.

Several parents said it was important that children return to a school in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown as soon as possible. Residents of towns where other mass school shootings occurred have grappled with the same dilemma. Some have renovated, some have demolished.

Columbine High School in Colorado, where two student gunmen killed 12 schoolmates and a teacher in 1999, reopened several months afterwards. Crews removed the library, where most of the victims died, and replaced it with an atrium. Virginia Tech converted a classroom building where a student gunman killed 32 people and himself in 2007 into a peace studies and violence prevention center. An Amish community in Pennsylvania tore down the West Nickel Mines Amish School and built a new school a few hundred yards away, after a gunman killed five girls there in 2006.

On the morning of 14 December, Adam Lanza, who had killed his mother at their Newtown home, went to Sandy Hook Elementary School and opened fire with an assault rifle. He killed himself as police arrived at the school.

The school shooting, one of the deadliest in US history, has spurred national debate about gun control and Second Amendment rights.