Children and teachers gathered on the grass in front of school no. 2 from Borodianka on Thursday morning for the first day of the course. There were parliaments and a recital of the Ukrainian national anthem and, as is traditional, the girls wore their hair in white scrunchies, the boys in white shirts. They brought flowers to give to their teachers.
But this year there will be no classes in the classrooms of School No. 2. Borodianka, a town north of Kyiv, was occupied by Russian forces in March. The invading soldiers used the school as a base and then trashed it as they left.
Teachers described returning to the school after liberation to find that soldiers had used several classrooms as toilets, leaving trash everywhere and needlessly destroying blackboards, early childhood education equipment, televisions and computers. They had painted anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia slogans on the walls and dug trenches behind the school.
A classroom as left by Russian soldiers. Photography: Valentyna Rozchenko
“The ironic thing is that the only classroom burned was the Russian literature classroom,” said Andriy Bondar, a physical education teacher at the school, during a tour of the building Thursday.
Like many other cities and towns in northern Ukraine, the residents of Borodianka endured a month of terror under the occupation, including indiscriminate shelling, executions and torture. Across the road from the school, a number of apartment blocks were flattened when Russian planes dropped heavy bombs in early March, killing most of the residents. Each person seemed to have their own horror story to tell.
Broken computer equipment on the floor. Photography: Valentyna Rozchenko
Thursday morning’s speeches stuck to familiar themes of defying the odds and ridding Ukraine of the “enemy.” There was a minute of silence for those who had died defending the country. After the ceremony, teachers and students returned home to begin classes with their smartphones and laptops. Only year 1 is taught face-to-face, joining another first year class in the only school in the town that has remained intact.
“I wanted to do something nice for everyone, give the kids some positivity,” said Inna Romaniuk, the principal, who said the school was undergoing renovations and they hoped to reopen next year.
Almost all the windows in the school were covered with plastic sheets, having been blown out by the impact of the strikes that affected the school building and its surroundings.
Windows broken by the impact of missile attacks. Photograph: Isobel Koshiw/The Guardian
Miraculously, the soccer field survived unscathed, said Bondar, the physical education teacher. The school places a special emphasis on football and three of its students have made the youth national team of Ukraine.
Parents of the 6 million Ukrainian students who returned to school on Thursday were asked to choose between online and offline learning. Only schools in areas that do not face a regular threat of bombing will reopen.
Where enough students have opted for face-to-face teaching and schools are fit for use, school administrations have prepared for the new school year by equipping basements as shelters and training teachers on what to do in case of attack All children who attend in person are told to bring an emergency bag with a change of clothes, any medication they may need, a note from a parent and, for younger children, a favorite toy.
School planks on the ground next to a Russian trench. Photography: Valentyna Rozchenko
Apart from the destruction, part of the challenge facing schools is psychological. Teachers at School No. 2 said more than half of parents had opted for distance learning because they feared the schools could be attacked.
“Our son is still afraid. She jumps when she hears a car,” said Natasha Shuka, the mother of Tetiana, a teenager at the school, who was watching the ceremony from the sidelines. “I can pretty much speak for everyone that we still feel fear every time we hear something out loud.”
“It’s all a process, we’ll try it for the first month and see how it goes,” said Svitlana Popova, a maths teacher at the school, whose house was destroyed by a rocket and who now lives in her shed. Popova taught her first lesson of the day from her garden, using her phone and a blackboard that she propped up against a donated cupboard.
Schools across the country have been the target of repeated attacks. The Prosecutor General of Ukraine reported that 2,300 educational insights had been affected, with 286 destroyed. Some have been used as bases by Russian troops because of their ability to accommodate troops with their toilets, showers and canteens. Others have been destroyed at random, many of them in the first days of the invasion.
Pro-Russian graffiti on the walls. Photograph: Isobel Koshiw/The Guardian
In areas of Ukraine that have come under heavy attack, students have been left with a poorer education system, according to a report by the Center for Information Resilience, a London-based human rights organization. The report found that in the Kharkiv region alone, Russian forces had attacked a boarding school for visually impaired students, a 218-year-old university library, a university training pool used by Olympic athletes and a professional college of nearly 100 years .
“The bombings not only destroyed classrooms, but blocked safe access to specialist equipment for disabled children, endangered books that had previously survived the Second World War, sabotaged Olympic dreams and disrupting education at colleges that have been operating for generations,” the report. said
Millions of people have fled Ukraine, including 22,000 teachers, according to Sergii Gorbachov, Ukraine’s ombudsman. About 440,000 remain, but the problem is not so much numbers as internal migration, he said. In some places there are too many teachers and in others not enough.
Additional reporting by Shaun Walker