The Town of Newtown, Conn., spent almost $1.4 million on the abatement and demolition of the former Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Construction crews recently finished demolition, which cost $850,000, according to a press release issued Thursday by the town. Additionally, abatement cost $1.3 million.

The process of building a new elementary school in the town will likely begin this year in the late summer or early fall months. Residents voted last October to raze the structure and reconstruct a new academic building on a modified version of the former site. Nothing will stand where a gunman killed 26 individuals in December 2012.

“We will confront what we have to confront and get it behind us,” First Selectman Pat Llodra said during a press conference held in Newtown ahead of the one-year mark last month. “We have the capacity to handle whatever it is we have to handle … I still think we are all in this together.”

Related: Making a senseless tragedy meaningful in Newtown

Students have attended classes at Chalk Hill Middle School in neighboring Monroe since two weeks after the tragedy.

The Board of Selectman appointed 12 residents to decide the nature, location, and funding of a permanent memorial to honor the 20 first-grade students and six educators killed in the massacre. Next, groups will finalize the architectrual and engineering drawings of the new building.