As Russia’s war grinds on, Ukrainian children began their new academic year on Monday in makeshift classrooms deep underground, where basements have been converted into schools to shield pupils from constant air raid threats.
Schools Forced Underground
In Bobryk, a village in the northern Sumy region near the front line, one school has relocated entirely to a basement. The move came two years ago, when air raid alerts lasting up to 20 hours made regular lessons impossible. “Time is the only thing you cannot make up,” said principal Oleksii Korenivskyi, adding, “We must do everything so this generation is not lost.”
The school’s new underground setting is inside a former administrative building, with classrooms divided by heavy plastic sheets, lacking doors and windows. Ventilation, electricity, and new flooring have been added to make the space usable. Children’s voices now echo through the narrow basement corridors as they resume in-person learning.
Despite the grim circumstances, children arrived for the first day of school wearing embroidered vyshyvanka shirts and carrying flowers for their teachers – a traditional gesture in Ukraine.
“Unfortunately, this ‘neighbour’ isn’t going anywhere,” Korenivskyi said of Russia, adding that the effort to build a safe underground school was worth every challenge.
The basement school is just one of many examples of how Ukrainians are striving to preserve normalcy for children whose education was already disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and is now threatened by war. (Inputs from AP)
