KRAKOW, Poland – Kindergartens have been bombed all over Ukraine, primary schools turned into shelters and in some cities like Mariupol their grounds have even become makeshift cemeteries.
As the war hits the country’s social institutions, education is one of its greatest victims. Parents, teachers and school administrators are making efforts to provide lessons to the 5.5 million school-age children left behind in the country, as well as thousands of others who have fled to other countries.
In many places, students connect online to their normal classrooms, if the schools in their hometown are still active and they have access to the Internet. But with such a massive displacement of teachers and students, the paths to learning are cumbersome: In some cases, teachers who have relocated within Ukraine teach students who have already fled the country, through a school system that left them both behind.
“The study is just like during the Covid times, but with constant interruptions to the air sirens,” said Inna Pasichnyk, 29, who fled to the Czech Republic with her 11-year-old son Volodymyr from their home in the Donetsk region. † He still calls every day in his class.
Alla Porkhovnyuk is now teaching distance learning to 11 to 13-year-olds after she and her children fled the port city of Yuzhne, near Odessa, to stay with relatives in central Ukraine. In addition to teaching history, much of her work involves reassuring children amid the fear of war.
“They often ask when the war will end, when will they go back to school?” she said. “I always smile and say it will be soon – we have to be patient a little longer.”
Millions of children and teachers have been forced to flee their homes since the Russian invasion began in February. Some end up elsewhere in Europe as refugees and go to classrooms in unknown countries and in unknown languages. Some have taken advantage of initiatives from the Ukrainian Ministry of Education that allow them to continue their studies online while finding shelter abroad, even if not through their own school district.
More than 13,000 schools have introduced distance learning and several dozen have a combination of face-to-face and online learning. There are nearly 1,100 schools in areas where the education process has been completely suspended because the security situation is so tense, officials said.
Many classrooms in Ukraine are simply unusable after being damaged or destroyed, or used for military purposes in some areas.
“Unfortunately, schools in Ukraine are still being attacked,” said Joe English, a UNICEF communications specialist who spent time in Ukraine during the war.
In times of war, classrooms can and should provide children with a sense of stability and act as a safe space in which to learn and process the trauma, Mr English said.
Ms. Pasichnyk and her son lived in Kramatorsk, a city in the east where a devastating attack on a train station took place last week. When the war started, they hurried out of their house, and Mrs. Pasichnyk said she couldn’t even remember how she packed her bag or what was in it.
“But Volodymyr even managed to get a pencil case and a notebook,” she said of her son. After they moved and settled in, he resumed his education via video call.
If the air-raid siren goes off, those still in town must take shelter, she said, and could derail lessons.
“Of course this is not the same training as in the days before the fighting in our city,” Ms Pasichnyk said, but she is happy that her son is at least getting back to a normal routine.
Mrs. Porkhovnyuk, the history teacher, hopes to be able to return home soon, but for now she logs in daily to give her lessons. About a third of her students are still in Yuzhne, she said, while the rest have moved abroad or to safer parts of the country.
Classes there were canceled for several weeks but resumed online in mid-March, she said. Lessons have been reduced to just 30 minutes and students are not given any homework or tests. Her focus is less on imparting new knowledge and more on diverting the children from war, Ms Porkhovnyuk said.
“My students are constantly forced to hide in basements and bomb shelters,” she said. “It’s impossible to get used to it.”
Olena Yurchenko, 24, who teaches 10- and 11-year-olds at a private school in Kiev, the capital, said classes resumed online at the end of March. She said she was nervous before the first lesson because she didn’t know if all her students were safe.
“But the biggest fear was how to answer all the questions children could ask,” said Ms Yurchenko, such as when the war would be over, their families would be safe, or what would happen in Kiev. “They were more scared and confused than the adults.”
She has found it difficult mentally and emotionally to adjust to teaching again.
“It’s like putting up a barrier within myself and separating myself completely from the war and the news, to provide quality materials for children and give the tenderness and empathy that I’m sure children really need right now,” she said.
While some schools have avoided the worst of the war, others have been embroiled in the fighting and have become the scenes of horror themselves.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
More than 900 educational institutions were damaged or in some cases completely destroyed by bombing and shelling on Monday, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science.
In some eastern cities completely occupied by Russian forces, Ukrainian authorities have reported disputes over what schools can teach, as Russian authorities are pushing for schools to revise their Ukrainian curricula and instead teach in accordance with with Russian schools. Some of these areas have large ethnic Russian populations.
For example, Russian troops detained the head of the education department in the occupied city of Melitopol, the mayor there said in late March, after educators resisted the order to change the curriculum.
The mayor, Ivan Fedorov, said in a video that Russian troops were trying to impose a shift in what schools taught, demanding that schools return to face-to-face lessons taught in Russian.
“The occupiers are going to schools, kindergartens and forcing our teachers and educators to resume the educational process with the help of an incomprehensible Russian program,” Fedorov said in the video.
Students in the city have continued classes online, but local officials have stressed it was too dangerous for children to return to the classroom. Melitopol, in a key area of southeastern territory between Russia-annexed Crimea and areas controlled by separatists to the east, has been occupied by Russian forces since the early days of the invasion.
At the end of last month, school principals across the city wrote resignation letters in defiance of Russian orders, Fedorov said. But on Monday, the new local government installed by Russian troops said it plans to reopen schools, according to Russian state television. It is unclear whether that happened, and Mr Fedorov said local teachers were not cooperating.
Eight years of war with Russian-backed separatists had already taken its toll in eastern Ukraine. More than 750 schools in the region had been destroyed, damaged or forced to close even before the Russian invasion began on February 24.
Save the Children, an international charity dedicated to improving the lives of children, has warned that attacks on schools and other educational facilities are a serious violation of children and could constitute a war crime.
Ms. Yurchenko, the teacher of a private school in Kiev, hopes that the war will not drag on and that she and her students can quickly resume their normal routine.
“But I’m sure it won’t be the same for both kids and adults,” she said. “We’ve all changed – the kids have grown up before our very eyes.”
Nataliia Novosolova contributed from Vinnytsia, Ukraine.
