How the war caused the classroom in Ukraine

Students a week meets a week to obtain lessons in a small underground semester called by the beehive, in order to formulate all the children packed at home.

Keeping above the ground in this part of Ukraine, in the city of Ballalia near the confrontation line, is very dangerous due to the constant threat of missiles and drones. Children spend most of their time on the Internet and take turns to the underground school.

“When they come, they often ask me,” Can we see the previous semesters? She said that the teachers have never imagined the children who yearn for school.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at undermining the future of the country in many ways, highlighting language and culture, destroying infrastructure and settling the entire cities with bombs in the east of the country.

The disruption of the education of Ukraine students of 3.7 million is one of the most dangerous challenges in the country. Experts say the classrooms have been cut again and again, leaving many students behind them academically. Children also lose their soft skills, such as communication and conflict resolution, from their inability to interact enough with other students.

The provision of chapters of any great obstacle to the country since it began the full invasion of Russia in 2022.

The alerts of the air raid regularly stopped the lessons available to those who enroll in school, which led to the sending of children who flow through the corridors to the lower floors, often for hours. Most students are partially studied online and goes to school for a day or more a week. In more dangerous parts of the country, closer to the confrontation line, students attend classrooms in underground bombs. Fourteen per cent of children studying the Ukrainian curriculum do this completely online, including about 300,000 lessons from abroad, according to the Ministry of Education.

The restrictions mean that many Ukrainian children are still talking to their classmates only on computer screens.

“It makes it very difficult for children to feel contact,” said Emmanuel Abrux, head of the UNICEF education department in Ukraine.

At Ballalia Elementary School, children study four days online and one day in the underground semester. Under the law, the school cannot accept the largest possible number of students as it can suit the bombs shelter, leaving children to study there on rotation.

At least 137 underground schools were built in Ukraine, especially in the east and south of the country, according to the Ministry of Education.

Many Ukrainians also remain online by choosing. For example, people internally displaced in the country prefer to keep their children in their old schools online instead of attending schools personally near their new homes. The result was a virtual online society for the destroyed eastern Ukraine cities.

Iryna, a teacher with special needs, from Sievieroodonetsk (which was renamed parliament in Ukraine last year Sceskodonetsk, a city occupied by Russia since June 2022, and later fled to Venitsia in central Ukraine. She only asked to use her first name, because her relatives live in an area under the Russian occupation.

She continues to work with her old school, which is now working on the Internet only, and keeps her son registered there as well. She said it was comfortable to stick a little from their home after they escaped.

The government encourages such practices as part of a broader plan to pay for personal education wherever possible. In July, the Ministry of Education published a 2025 plan with the return of returning at least 300,000 children to schools and reducing the number of those studying online.

The proposals stop closing schools, such as Iryna, which works online from exile, but teachers and parents are concerned that such a step may come later.

Even when schools are virtual, “People are real and familiar,” said Erina, adding, “My colleagues are dear to me.”

She teaches children all over Ukraine and around Europe, and still has one student in Sievierodonetsk. She said that the fear of persecution rarely joins the student online, but teachers send him tasks to complete them. Her other students appear on the screen, and they do their best to repeat what they did personally before starting the comprehensive invasion.

“Children need us here on the Internet, and we are doing our best to keep what we have,” she said.

For those who are under the Russian occupation, joining Ukrainian schools via the Internet is a great danger. The occupation authorities force them to enroll in local schools Study the Russian curriculumResidents of the occupied regions say.

Hanna, 35, who is a mother of Meltopol in the occupied part of the Zaborisvia region in southeast Ukraine, said that she lived under occupation for a year and a half before fleeing to another Ukrainian city in August 2023. She said she did not want her to provide her full name because she still has a family In Meltopol, which may be in danger.

In the first year of the occupation, she said, her 6 -year -old son studied a Ukrainian school remotely. The Russian soldiers have once searched their house, in search of weapons. She said, “They saw that the child was young and did not force us to join the Russian school.” But she kept his internet lessons in the secret of the Ukrainian school not only from Russian soldiers, but also from the neighbors.

She said that she was once worried when her son spoke with other children in a stadium, and Ukrainian authors stated that he was studying in his seasons on the Internet. “Soon I shouted, quiet!” She said: “It is not allowed to talk about this here.”

While the semesters online-which started for the first time during the Covid-are now routine for many Ukrainian school students, some critics say that education is still stuck in an old educational system.

Tymofiy Brik, Dean of Kiev College of Economics, said the government provides books but no directives on how to make interactive lessons and more attractive to students.

He said that through online education, it is difficult to maintain the interest of children more than the classroom, so it is due to individual teachers to find ways to involve their classes. “Some children are more fortunate than others,” he said.

However, Ms. Abraio from UNICEF said that teachers learned some lessons about online learning during the epidemic that helped them when the war began.

“In some way, we are very lucky because in a situation there was a lot of research that I conducted after the epidemic on the impact of school closing and disrupting education on children’s education,” she said.

In Ukraine, the Children’s Fund has started in many projects aimed at helping students to catch up with the training teachers and push them to provide post -school lessons in person. The box also provides laptops for teachers and children they need.

While such efforts help in learning online, many parents and children are not in their patience over the personal classes to start again in schools.

Svetlana Stepurnko, 34, and her 9 -year -old daughter, Ukraine, left after the Russian forces occupied Klela. They fled to Norway, where children are now studying while waiting for the war to end so that they can return to their old school.

Girls, like tens of thousands of other children in refugee families abroad, attend local schools and then log in to Ukrainian lessons online in the afternoon. Mrs. Steranino is concerned that her children will find it difficult to catch up with their classmates in Ukraine.

She said, “Even if it is great here, we miss the house and want to return to our school a lot.”