Students meet the day of the week for lessons in a small underground class, which teachers call the hive to buzz all children wrapped inside.
Holding classes above the ground in this part of Ukraine, in the city of Balakliya near the front line, is considered too dangerous due to the ubiquitous threat of Russian missiles and drones. Children spend most of their time in online classes and take turns underground.
“When they come, they often ask me,” Can we see our former class? “Inna Mandryka, deputy headmaster, said, as she said, she never imagined children who longs for school.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was intended to undermine the future of the country in many ways, to set out tongue and culture, destroy the infrastructure and equalize the whole cities of bombs in the east of the country.
Disruption of 3.7 million schoolchildren in Ukraine is one of the most serious challenges for the country. The classes were repeatedly interrupted and many students left far behind academically, experts say. Children also lose their soft skills such as communication and conflict solutions, to interact with other students sufficiently from the disease.
The provision of classes of any kind was a huge obstacle to the country because the Russian invasion in full scale began in 2022.
Air Raid Caution has regularly interrupted lessons for those who attend school and send children who walk through the cellars, often for hours. Most students study partly online and attend school in person for one or more days a week. In the more dangerous parts of the country, closer to the front line, students attend classes in underground bombings. According to the Ministry of Education, fourteen percent of children studying Ukrainian curriculum, including about 300,000 lessons from abroad.
Restrictions mean that many Ukrainian children are still chatting with their classmates only on computer screens.
“It is very difficult for children to feel interconnected,” said Emmanuelle Abrioux, head of the UNICEF education section in Ukraine.
At Balakliya Elementary School, children study four days online and one day in an underground class. According to the law, the school can only adopt as many students as it fits in their bomb hiding, and the children have been studying there for rotation.
According to the Ministry of Education, at least 137 underground schools were built in Ukraine, especially in the east and south of the country.
Many Ukrainians also remain online. For example, internally displaced people in the country, often prefer their children to stay online in their old schools rather than attend schools personally near their new homes. The result was the virtual community online for destroyed cities of eastern Ukraine.
Aryna, a special needs teacher, comes from Sievierodonetsk (who was renamed Siverskodonetsk last year), the city of Russia from Russia since June 2022, and later fled to Vinnytsia in Central Ukraine. She asked to use only her first name because her relatives live in the area under the Russian occupation.
He continues to work with his old school, which now operates only online, and keeps her son. She said it was reassuring to hold on a little of her home after they fled.
The government discourages such practices as part of the wider plan to promote personal education, if possible. In July, the Ministry of Education published a plan for 2025, which aims to bring back at least 300,000 children back to schools and reduce the number of those who study online.
Proposals will cease to close schools such as Iryna, which work online from exile, but teachers and parents fear that such a step may come later.
Although the schools are virtual, “people are real and acquaintances,” Iryna said, adding, “My colleagues are expensive to me.”
He teaches children from all over Ukraine to Europe and still has one student in Sievierodonet. The student was afraid of persecution and rarely joined the online lessons, said, but the teachers sent him tasks to finish. Her other students appear on the screen and do their best to duplicate what they have done personally before the invasion of the full scale.
“Children need us online here and we try to best keep what we have,” she said.
For those who are under the Russian occupation, it is associated with Ukrainian online schools a great risk. The occupation authorities force them to attend local schools and Study the Russian curriculumThey say residents of the occupied regions.
Hanna, 35, the mother of one of Melitopol in the occupied part of the Zeporizzhia region in southeast Ukraine, said she lived under the occupation for a year and a half before she fled to another Ukrainian city in August 2023. that could be endangered.
In the first year of the occupation, she said that her six -year -old son studied at the Ukrainian school remotely. Russian soldiers once searched their home looking for weapons. “They saw that the child was young and did not force us to attend a Russian school,” she said. His online class, however, maintained in Ukrainian school secrets not only from Russian soldiers but also from neighbors.
She said she was one day concerned when he spoke to other children on the pitch, her son mentioned the Ukrainian authors he studied in his online classes. “I screamed quickly at him,” Silence! It’s not allowed to speak here, ”she said.
While online courses-which were first launched during the Covid-with pandemic have now become routine for many Ukrainian schoolchildren, some critics claim that the instructions remain neglected in the old-fashioned education system.
The government provides books, but no instructions on how to make lessons interactive and more engaging for students, said Tymofiy Brik, Dean of the Economic School of Kiev.
With online education, it is harder to maintain children’s interest than in classes, he said, so it is up to individual teachers to find ways to involve their classes. “Some children are happier than others,” he said.
Mrs. Abrioux of UNICEF, however, said that teachers learned several lessons of online learning during the pandemic that helped with their planning when the war began.
“It is irony that we are quite happy that we are in a situation where there was a lot of research on the impact of the school’s closure and the disturbed education on school attendance,” she said.
In Ukraine, the Children’s Fund has launched several projects aimed at helping students to catch up, which included teachers of training and paying for personally to provide extracurricular classes. The fund also supplies notebooks to teachers and children who need them.
Although such an effort has helped with online learning, many parents and children are impatient for personal classes to start again in schools.
Svitlan Stepurenko (34 years) and her 9 and twelve -year -old daughters left Ukraine after the Russian forces occupied Balakliya. They fled to Norway, where children are now studying when they are waiting for the war to be able to return to their old school.
Girls, like tens of thousands of other children in the families of refugees abroad, attend local schools and then apply for the Ukrainian lessons online in the afternoon. Mrs. Stepurenko is afraid that her children will be difficult to catch up with her classmates in Ukraine.
“Even though it’s nice,” she said, “we miss at home and we want to return to our school very much.”
