Five years without a classroom: How Ukraine is taking schools underground
For some Ukrainian children, remote learning was supposed to be temporary. Five years into Russia's full-scale war, they are still waiting to return to a classroom.
In frontline regions studied by Ukrainian education charity savED last year, nearly half of students were learning exclusively online. Some children have now spent five years without attending school normally.
As Russia intensifies attacks across Ukraine, the country faces a problem with no easy solution: how to keep children physically safe without sacrificing years of their education.
For Anna Novosad, Ukraine's former education minister and now head of savED, simply sending everyone back to Zoom is not the answer.
“Moving all children to remote learning just because it is cheaper is not an option,” she told hromadske.
Remote education comes with its own cost, Novosad argues - one that may only become apparent years later.
A 2025 savED survey of nearly 2,000 students found that 57% of teenagers attending school in person said they had many friends among their classmates. Among students learning exclusively online, the figure was 41%.
There is an academic cost as well.
An educational gap that appears in fifth grade does not simply disappear, Novosad said. Instead, children carry it into sixth, seventh and eighth grade, making subsequent material harder to master.
“Remote learning also has a price,” she said. “It just becomes apparent later.”
When surviving the air raid is not enough
Of Ukraine's 11,940 schools, more than 8,000 are operating fully in person this academic year. More than 2,200 use a hybrid model, while 1,306 remain entirely remote. The format depends largely on the security situation and whether schools have adequate shelters.
But having a shelter does not necessarily mean children can have a normal school day.
In some frontline communities last academic year, air raid alerts lasted between four and eight hours a day - sometimes longer.
“If a child spends all that time simply sitting on a bench in a basement corridor, we have protected them physically, but they have lost the school day,” Novosad said.
Many school shelters were designed primarily to keep children alive during an attack. They can suffer from poor ventilation, damp, cold, inadequate lighting and too few toilets - conditions unsuitable for spending hours studying underground.
Five years into the full-scale war, Novosad says safety alone is no longer enough.
The challenge is increasingly to turn shelters into places where school can continue even while an air raid is underway.
Rather than constructing expensive underground schools from scratch everywhere, savED often adapts existing basements, installing ventilation, heating, toilets, lighting, furniture and internet access.
The spaces are designed not merely as bunkers but as classrooms where children can continue lessons, catch up on missed material, attend extracurricular activities, read or simply spend time with other children.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, savED has renovated and equipped more than 70 school shelters in frontline communities across six Ukrainian regions and created more than 160 education centers, some of which also serve as shelters.
In Izium, a city in the northeastern Kharkiv region that was occupied by Russian forces in 2022, one such underground education center has become a gathering place not only for children but also for adults.
“If there are few safe places in a community, closing a well-equipped educational space at two in the afternoon just because lessons have ended seems strange to me,” Novosad said.
The communities that need shelters most can least afford them
The problem is particularly acute in frontline areas.
The communities most in need of safe schools are often those whose finances have been most devastated by the war. Infrastructure has been destroyed, businesses and tax revenues have disappeared, and populations have shrunk.
Expecting such communities to finance expensive underground facilities themselves is unrealistic, Novosad said.
New underground schools can cost tens of millions of hryvnias, while adapting an existing basement can be considerably cheaper. State funding, local authorities, international partners and charities therefore often have to work together.
Novosad argues that limited resources should be prioritized for places where the absence of a shelter has left hundreds of children without access to in-person education for years.
Solutions do not always require putting a bunker beneath every school.
In smaller communities, children from several schools can share one underground education center. In the Velykodolynske community in southern Ukraine's Odesa region, for example, students from four schools travel to one underground facility, where children in grades five through nine can study mathematics, Ukrainian, English and history and take STEAM classes.
“That is the difference between a basement and an educational space,” Novosad said.
The same thinking is shaping what Ukraine expects these spaces to become after the war. Some are already being designed to eventually serve as libraries, laboratories, youth centers and places for extracurricular activities rather than becoming obsolete once air raids end.
For Novosad, however, the measure of success is not the number of shelters built or square meters renovated.
“The result is when a child who for several years saw a classroom only on a screen once again has somewhere to come in the morning, sit next to classmates and continue the lesson even during an air raid,” she said.