Ukraine’s Students Endure Thousands of Hours in Shelters as School Attacks Escalate

Since the academic year began, Ukrainian children have spent an average of 34 hours sheltering from air raids during school hours through October 20—a loss exceeding 13 percent of scheduled instructional time, according to UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires. In several regions, that figure surpasses 60 hours.

The toll deepened Monday when a strike on a school and aid distribution center in Komyshuvakha, Zaporizhzhia region, killed at least 29 civilians. Most victims were residents seeking humanitarian assistance and local administration employees, said Matthias Schmale, the UN’s Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine. Follow-up strikes on the same site killed two rescuers and four police officers responding to the initial attack, with nearly 50 people still unaccounted for.

Learning Under Sirens

Air raid alerts have surged across the country. In Kyiv, school-time alarms rose from 12 in September 2025 to 71 in September 2026. Students in Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, and Kharkiv regions have endured more than 60 hours of alerts each—roughly a quarter of their scheduled learning time—disrupting education for over 560,000 children.

“I’ve just returned to in-person school; however, we still spend most of our school day in a shelter because of air raids,” said 15-year-old Katia from the Mykolaiv region, recounting her experience to Pires.

Pires described a visible mental health crisis among students during a recent visit to underground classrooms. “Even then, they are dealing with air raid alarms all the time… you could feel that some of them, especially the older ones, expressed a lot of anxiety and shared with us their inability to fully concentrate and kind of leave what’s happening above ground.”

A Generation Under Pressure

Education Cannot Wait Director Yasmine Sherif echoed those warnings, noting that the war’s psychological impact has forced the global fund to divert critical resources toward psychosocial support. “We are carving away… essential money that we need for teaching and learning in order to support children’s ability to cope with learning in very difficult circumstances,” she said.

Source link