Far from normal return to school in Ukraine

(AP):

It was the first day of school in Ukraine on Thursday but children weren't sharing memories of fun vacations with their families, their stories were of surviving war.

For many, their last day of school was the day before the February 24 Russian invasion of their country. At least 379 children have been killed since the war began, while the whereabouts of 223 others are unknown, according to Ukraine's General Prosecutors office. Another 7,013 children were among Ukrainians forcibly transferred to Russia from Russian-occupied areas. Six months of war damaged 2,400 schools across the country, including 269 that were completely destroyed, officials said.

Civilian areas and schools continue to be hit and children keep being killed. But after the first months of shock, 51 per cent of schools in Ukraine, despite the risk, are reopening to in-person education, with an option to study online if the parents prefer. But safety remains the priority. At schools that don't have quick access to shelters or are located close to the borders with Belarus and Russia, or near active military zones, children will only study online.

That's the case for the seventh graders in Mykhailo-Kotsyubynske, just 20 miles (35 kilometres) from the Belarus border, who gathered at their badly damaged school this week to pick up textbooks for studying online.

"We haven't seen each other for such a long time. You all have grown so much," said their teacher, Olena Serdiuk, standing in a corner of the classroom, where windows were covered with thick black polythene instead of glass.

Oleksii Lytvyn, 13, remembers very well the day Russian missiles hit the school twice. It was March 4, and he was in the school's bomb shelter with his family and dozens of other people.

Just minutes before the blast, he had been playing with a friend. After the loud explosion, the walls began shaking and he couldn't see anything but a huge cloud of debris. One person was killed, a woman who worked at the school.

"We were sleeping in the corridor, and there was a corpse of a dead person behind the wall," Oleksii recalled. His family stayed one more night before fleeing town, though they have since returned for the start of the school year. Oleksii's classmates shared similar stories about that day and the month-long Russian occupation that followed.

Their school is still badly damaged. Debris fills the second floor, and the roof and heating system need to be repaired - money the school doesn't have.

Even though they will be studying online, the students had to undergo security training. Serdiuk told the class to follow her to the same bomb shelter where many survived the blast in March.

Schools in the Kyiv and Lviv regions were among those welcoming students back to classrooms Thursday, including more than 7,300 displaced students forced to flee their home towns.