Ukrainian students begin a New School Year

It was the first day of school in geography teacher Larysa Kulyaba’s classroom in western Ukraine, but the number she wrote on the chalkboard Friday was not part of her traditional curriculum. The three digits — 555 — represented the number of days since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

On the first day of school across Ukraine, she was lecturing a group of 11th graders on resilience.

“Each of you knows examples of unbreakable Ukrainians,” Kulyaba said, prompting her students to speak. One girl teared up talking about her cousin fighting on the front. Another boy spoke of his brother, a soldier far from home somewhere in the war.

For Ukraine’s students, learning resilience has been a central part of their education since Russia’s invasion last year, which has showered cities, towns and villages with missiles, rockets and shells. Most schools were closed, many were destroyed, and children were forced to find any way they could to keep learning — from online classes to attending lectures in bomb shelters.

As a new academic year begins, with no city in Ukraine safe from the possibility of Russian strikes, students are once again returning to classrooms under threat, if they return at all.

Gymnasium Prestige, the roughly 900-student secondary school in the western city of Lviv where Kulyaba teaches, has a well stocked shelter and plenty of sandbags.

The chance of an airstrike is relatively low, given the school’s location hundreds of miles from the front line, but given its proximity to a nearby railroad — a potential Russian target — children’s parents are quick to whisk them away whenever an air raid siren sounds.

“Everyone is affected by the war,” said the principal, Khrystyna Zhyvko-Hermak. “Even those in western Ukraine.”

One of the hidden casualties of the war has been “widespread learning loss” among Ukrainian students, according to a report this week by the United Nations children’s agency.

“Inside Ukraine, attacks on schools have continued unabated, leaving children deeply distressed and without safe spaces to learn,” Regina De Dominicis, the agency’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia, said in the report. “Not only has this left Ukraine’s children struggling to progress in their education, but they are also struggling to retain what they learnt when their schools were fully functioning.”

Language learning and math skills have been significantly affected, according to the report, and only a third of students of primary and secondary school age are attending classes in person. Many children who live near the front line in eastern and southern Ukraine are not being sent to classes, with schools in those areas often having been converted to military bases.

In the west, where many Ukrainian families from front-line areas have moved to escape the fighting, children also suffer in other ways. Many come from predominantly Russian-speaking areas and are sometimes picked on by classmates for the language they speak at home, Zhyvko-Hermak said.

A student in Kulyaba’s class, who had evacuated from the southern city of Mykolaiv with his family and originally spoke Russian, said he likes it in Lviv but that “the mentality of the people is different.”

“I now speak Ukrainian, but there are still many people in my city who don’t speak Ukrainian well,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.