It was a calm summer morning in Romny, a small town in northern Ukraine.
Last Wednesday, Tetyana Prokopenko, a school principal nearby, told her husband that she needed to attend meetings to get ready for the upcoming school period.
Just after 10:00 in the morning, she and her deputy, secretary, and a librarian would be dead.
They were all murdered by a Russian kamikaze drone that nearly wiped out their school.
She really loved that school, it meant everything to her. Prokopenko’s husband, Valery, says with tears that she was there all the time.
Russian air attacks will pose a continuous danger to Ukrainian teachers, children, and parents as the new school term starts on September 1st.
According to the Ukrainian government, over 360 schools have been completely destroyed and over 3,000 schools have been damaged during the war with Russia.
Russia and Amnesty International say Ukraine has created military bases in schools, but Kyiv calls these allegations lies and propaganda.
“I promise that there were no soldiers present,” Valery says about the school in Romny where his wife was killed.
To reduce the dangerous risk, lots of students will be learning from home, and it is the job of the local governments to decide if classes will be held in the school or online.
Their choice is based on how safe it is in each area and if the schools there have places to protect against bombs.
Kharkiv, the second biggest city in Ukraine, is located near the border of Russia and often becomes a target for attacks. As a result, most of the education in that place will be conducted online.
To make sure students can learn safely in person, the people in charge have created 60 classrooms at subway stations underground. These classrooms can fit over 1,000 students.
The Deputy Education Minister, Andriy Stashkiv, has informed the BBC that around one-sixth of schools in Ukraine will be conducting classes remotely. However, this is a significant decrease compared to last year when one in three schools were doing the same.
The lessons and activities taught during wartime.
Around 80,000 students from areas in Ukraine that are controlled by Russia will be logging into their classes.
It’s very difficult for us, and it’s not safe for them because the people who are in control threaten them and their parents if they find out that they are still going to Ukrainian schools. Stashkiv says that it is a very important security problem. Schools don’t disclose the identities of these students because it could endanger their lives and health.
The school will change what students learn to fit the needs of times of war. One of the changes is that everyone will have to study mine safety.
The course is made easier for younger kids by including Patron, a well-known dog who sniffs out mines. Patron also appears in a cartoon series that teaches young Ukrainians about the dangers of unexploded weapons.
Pictures of a nice Jack Russell terrier help make Ukrainian children feel safe in their minds and emotions, according to Lesya Yurchyshyn, a teacher from Kyiv, who spoke to the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast.
Ukraine’s education ministry removed many Russian writers from the curriculum last year because of the war with Russia.
The war has caused a lot of problems for education in Ukraine and it has made it really bad.
The UN’s children’s agency Unicef has reported that children in Ukraine are experiencing a significant decline in their ability to learn.
In Ukraine, attacks on schools keep happening without stopping. This makes children very sad and they don’t have safe places to learn. The children in Ukraine are having a hard time learning and remembering what they learn in school.
It has been a long time since schools in front-line cities like Zaporizhzhia were fully open. Instead, they have been using remote education with occasional breaks since Covid restrictions started in spring 2020.
“This is not the usual way of learning,” says Kostyantyn Samiylo, the principal of Perspektyva school in Zaporizhzhia. The children have not had good schooling for three years.
He said that when children learn remotely, it is harder to keep them interested or see how much they understand.
Mr Samiylo is talking about how he has been sad because he hasn’t been able to see children going to school. He says that you can only see this in places that are far away from where there is fighting happening.
I cried when I visited western Ukraine last year and saw kids with their small backpacks going to school. Samiylo says it is really bad to think that our children don’t get this chance.
However distance learning may affect education in Ukraine, everyone agrees that safety is the most important thing.