Ukraine’s eastern metropolis of Kharkiv will build the country’s first fully underground school to shield pupils from Russia’s frequent bomb and missile attacks, the city’s mayor has said.
“Such a shelter will enable thousands of Kharkiv children to continue their safe face-to-face education even during missile threats,” Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
While many schools in the frontline regions have been forced to teach online throughout the war, Kharkiv has organised about 60 separate classrooms throughout its metro stations before the school year that started 1 September, creating space for more than 1,000 children to study there.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, had a population of more than 1.4 million before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Parts of the city lie less than 35km (20 miles) from the Russian border and it has been subject to near-daily Russian rocket and missile attacks that can hit before residents can reach shelters.
Before the start of this school year, Kharkiv city authorities hit on a simple plan to bring in-person school back: inside the city’s deep metro system.
At the height of the bombing last year, 160,000 people slept on the wide platforms and in the lofty corridors of the Kharkiv underground, and among them, said Kharkiv’s head of education, Olha Demenko, were 7,000 children.
“We did activities like playing and singing with them during that time – and, when this new school year was ahead of us, we wondered: what if we could do it again, but in a more organised way?”
Terekhov said the new school would “meet the most modern regulatory requirements for protective structures. Such a shelter will enable thousands of Kharkiv children to continue their safe face-to-face education even during missile threats.”
It was not immediately clear how big the school will be or when it will open.
But the mayor said that funding for schools would not be cut “by a single hryvnia” this year or next, adding that “Kharkiv is the most intelligent city in Ukraine” thanks to its educational community.
In the 24 hours to Monday, a civilian man died and several houses were damaged as a result of Russia’s shelling and rocket attacks, Oleh Sinehubov, the governor of the Kharkiv region of which the city of Kharkiv is its administrative centre, said.
The war, which has no end in sight, has killed thousands and displaced millions of civilians. Ukraine’s ministry of educations says that 363 educational institutions have been destroyed and nearly 3,800 damaged throughout the country.
