Ukraine’s wartime schools: Intensity, purpose, and an eye to safety
As a rising first grader, Masha Komarova was anxious to start school and make new friends in her new home in Makariv, a village about an hour west of Kyiv.
There was just one problem: Masha and her family had arrived in April from Kherson in southeastern Ukraine, a city now occupied by Russian forces. And in Kherson, Masha spoke Russian and was preparing for first grade subjects that would be taught in Russian.
But in Makariv – a town that suffered heavy Russian shelling for a month at the start of the war and was partially occupied but never fell to the aggressors – school instruction is strictly in Ukrainian.
“We’ve been working on the Ukrainian all summer, and she’s got it to where she’ll be fine with it,” says her mother, Anastasiia Komarova. While her mother speaks, Masha jumps around the steps to her new school, Makariv Lyceum No. 2, the Ukrainian national symbol on her T-shirt and an orange sucker in one hand.
