Danyil Mykhailiv left Kyiv with his parents, three-year-old sister and grandparents shortly after the war started and they now live in Lviv.ANTON SKYBA/The Globe and Mail
Danyil Mykhailiv did something on Monday that should be ordinary for most children but is extraordinary for millions of kids in Ukraine these days: He attended school.
Danyil, who is 13, left Kyiv shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began last month and a rocket slammed into his school. He crammed into a car with his mother, father, three-year-old sister and grandparents and they headed west to Lviv.
On Monday, Danyil opened his computer and saw his teacher in Kyiv for the first time since the war began. “I was excited to see him,” Danyil said during a break from his online lessons in biology and physics. “I’m missing my school and my teachers.”
Danyil was one of thousands of children who tapped into classes offered by schools across Kyiv on Monday as local officials moved to restart the education system despite continued bombardment by Russia. City leaders said resuming classes was critical in helping children keep up with their studies and cope with the continuing stress of the war.
“An important task is for the city to live and work even under such strict martial law,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Sunday in announcing the school reopening. The Russians “are trying to intimidate us. That will not work. We will not give up.”
Running an effective educational program in the midst of a war won’t be easy. An estimated 1.5 million children have left Ukraine since the conflict began, reports UNICEF, and millions more have been displaced internally. Many of those children don’t have access to a laptop or the internet. Teachers, too, have been leaving the country in droves or joining the Territorial Defence Forces, which are largely made up of civilians.
In addition, the country’s education infrastructure has been devastated. Officials said that 656 schools and universities have been at least partly damaged by Russian bombing and another 74 have been completely destroyed. Many school buildings, especially in the western part of the country, which is generally safer, have been turned into shelters for refugees.
There have been plenty of offers of help. Volunteers have stepped in for teachers, and cities across Europe have opened places in local schools for refugee children. The European Union has also committed to provide funding to help refugees access Ukrainian schools online.
Many Ukrainian teachers have also made enormous sacrifices by giving lessons from bomb shelters or doggedly returning to their laptops after repeated air raid warnings.
The teachers “are incredible,” said Danyil’s mother, Nadya Mykhailiv. She said that one of her son’s teachers, Salyak Vasily Mikhailovich, was facing war for the second time. He used to live in eastern Ukraine but had to flee the fighting that broke out in 2014 and moved to Kyiv. “Our teachers are very strong and they love our children,” she said.
Danyil Mykhailiv starts online lesson at his old school in Kyiv for the first time in a month. His sister, Dominkia, plays in the background.ANTON SKYBA/The Globe and Mail
Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science, Serhiy Shkarlet, said on Monday that progress has been made in restarting the school system nationally. Classes have now resumed, either in person or online, in 13 of the country’s 24 regions, known as oblasts. Teaching remained either suspended or only partly available in the remaining ones.
In recognition of the challenges students face, the ministry has modified some school curriculums and cut the number of national exams for graduating high-school students to one from three. “We are trying to do all we can to ensure that each and every child, regardless of where they are, will have the same chance to continue their education,” Mr. Shkarlet said.
National officials are concerned that many of the children who have left Ukraine won’t return, and that schools across Europe will poach the brightest pupils. Mr. Shkarlet said that he was well aware of “educational looting” and that the government was trying to tackle the issue by simplifying university entrance requirements. He has also urged the EU to help Ukraine further develop its online educational portal and create more opportunities for refugees living abroad to study in Ukrainian, so they can “return home and build a new Ukraine.”
Andriy Moskalenko, the first deputy mayor of Lviv, said officials have so far been able to accommodate online learning for thousands of children who have come to the city from war-torn parts of the country. Between 10,000 and 30,000 people seek shelter in Lviv every day and while many move on to Poland, Mr. Moskalenko said around 200,000 have stayed in the area.
Roughly 75,000 children in the city have been receiving instruction online for the past couple of weeks and around 15 per cent of them log in from another country, he said. Another 2,300 refugee children living in the city have started online lessons including 100 who live and learn in shelters. “It’s quite important,” he said of resuming classes. “We need to invest in our children to be ready for when the war is over.”
He added that keeping schools open, even if only online, helped families tune out the horrors of the conflict, at least for a few hours. “It’s like some connection with what was regular. It’s completely changed, because of other conditions, but it’s generally similar to like it was before.”
However, for some families many obstacles remain. Lesia Bilolutska left her home in Brovary, just north of Kyiv, for Poland a few days after the start of the war. She now lives in Duszniki Zdroj, a resort town near the border with the Czech Republic.
Her 14-year-old son, Maksym, has trouble logging on to his school’s online classroom, and Ms. Bilolutska said that even when he does, the lessons are bare bones with no student participation. While some students in Ukraine received around three lessons a day, she said her son was lucky to get one or two a week. “Some teachers don’t have permanent access to the internet or they have moved to a village and then the village is bombed, or there’s no power,” she said. “It’s very unreliable.”
Ms. Bilolutska added quickly that, despite the problems, her family was coping and she realizes that others have far greater concerns. She knows one boy who was shot while trying to escape a Russian attack. “When I think about the people I know and see what problems they have, I say, ‘Come on Lesia it’s not that bad here.’ ”
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Paul Waldie