Children Return To Ukrainian School Trashed By Russian Occupation Forces Ukraine

But this year there will be no classes in the classrooms of School No. 2. Borodyanka, a town north of Kiev, was captured by Russian forces in March. The invading soldiers used the school as a base and then trashed it. The teachers described returning to the school after its liberation to find that the soldiers had used many classrooms as toilets, left rubbish everywhere and needlessly destroyed whiteboards, polyethylene equipment, televisions and computers. They had graffitied anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian slogans on the walls and dug trenches behind the school. A class as the Russian soldiers left it. Photo: Valentyna Rozchenko “The irony is that the only classroom that burned down was the Russian literature classroom,” Andriy Bondar, the school’s PE teacher, said during a tour of the building Thursday. Like many other towns and villages in northern Ukraine, the residents of Borodyanka endured a month of terror under occupation, including indiscriminate shelling, executions and torture. Just below the school, a row of apartment buildings was leveled 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. He broke computer equipment on the floor. Photo: Valentyna Rozchenko Thursday morning’s speeches stuck to the familiar themes of defying the odds and ridding Ukraine of the “enemy.” A minute’s silence was observed for those who lost their lives defending the country. After the ceremony, teachers and students returned home to begin their lessons with their smartphones and laptops. Only in year 1 will he learn in person, joining another freshman class in the town’s only school left intact. “I wanted to do something nice for everyone, give some positivity to the kids,” said Inna Romaniuk, the principal, who said the school was undergoing renovations and hoped to reopen next year. Almost all the windows of the school were covered with plastic sheets, which had exploded from the impacts that hit the school building and the surrounding area. The windows were blown out by the impact of the missiles. Photo: Isobel Koshiw/The Guardian Miraculously, the soccer field survived unscathed, said Bondar, the PE teacher. The school places special emphasis on football and three of its students have made the Ukrainian national youth team. 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 risk of bombing will reopen. Where many students have chosen to teach in person and schools are fit for use, school administrators are preparing for the new academic year by equipping basements as shelters and training teachers on what to do in the event of an attack. All children attending in person are asked to bring an emergency bag with a change of clothes, any medicine they may need, a note from their parents and, for younger children, a favorite toy. School desks on the ground next to a Russian trench. Photo: Valentyna Rozchenko Beyond the disaster, part of the challenge facing schools is psychological. Teachers at School No. 2 said more than half of parents opted for distance learning because they feared they might be attacked in schools. “Our child is still scared. He jumps when he hears a car,” said Natasha Shuka, the mother of Tetiana, a teenager at the school, who watched the ceremony from the sidelines. “I can speak for everyone that we still feel fear every time we hear something out loud.” “Everything is a process, we will try for the first month and see how it goes,” said Svitlana Popova, a math teacher at the school, whose home 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 propped up on a provided cabinet. Schools across the country have been the target of repeated attacks. The Prosecutor General of Ukraine reported that 2,300 educational intuitions were hit, while 286 were destroyed. Some have been used as bases by Russian troops due to their ability to accommodate troops with their toilets, showers and canteens. Others have been accidentally destroyed, many of them in the first days of the invasion. Pro-Russian graffiti on the walls. Photo: 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 group. The report found that in the Kharkiv region alone, Russian forces had targeted a boarding school for visually impaired students, a 218-year-old university library, a university training pool used by Olympic athletes and a nearly 100-year-old vocational college. . “Bombing has not just destroyed classrooms, it has prevented safe access to specialist equipment for children with disabilities, endangered books that had previously survived World War II, sabotaged Olympic dreams and disrupted teaching at colleges that had been operating for generations “, the exhibition. he said. Millions of people have left Ukraine, including 22,000 teachers, according to Sergii Gorbachov, Ukraine’s education 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

title: “Children Return To Ukrainian School Trashed By Russian Occupation Forces Ukraine Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Gary Saroop”

title: “Children Return To Ukrainian School Trashed By Russian Occupation Forces Ukraine Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-10-23” author: “Richard Smith”

title: “Children Return To Ukrainian School Trashed By Russian Occupation Forces Ukraine Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-09” author: “Carey Loveall”