Svitlana Popova’s students didn’t realize she was leading their online math class while outside the charred remains of her home in Ukraine until they saw a news video .

Her students were in their own difficult circumstances, too – seeking refuge away from their homes, some in other countries.

Popova is a mathematics teacher in the town of Borodyanka, in the Kyiv region of Ukraine. Her school was seized as a headquarters by Russian military forces and heavily damaged before their retreat. After her classroom transitioned to online instruction, Russian tanks fired on her house and burned it down. Yet this dedicated teacher continued to lead virtual lessons from a small umbrella-covered table in the yard.

Ordinary Ukrainians have been hailed for their heroism since Russia’s full-scale invasion. “There are no small matters in a great war,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy affirmed in an emotional . “Each of us is a fighter,” Zelenskyy stated. “Each of us is the basis of defense.”

Listing the tools of war — ship’s helms, steering wheels, weapons, scalpels — Zelenskyy ended with an unexpected inclusion: the teacher’s pointer. This passing remark highlights an often hidden front in Ukraine’s defensive struggle — the fight by countless teachers and parents to keep more than educated, even as their worlds have been thrown into upheaval.

Educational efforts

Like Ukraine’s stunning resistance itself, local educators are rising to the occasion despite enormous challenges. Viral videos show teachers continuing to instruct their small pupils in during active bombardments, or conducting lessons inside a after schools lose electricity. Gas stations and grocery stores, powered by generators long after homes and schools lose power, are being into hubs for filming virtual lessons.

One Kyiv teacher spent hours outside a store, determined to finish sharing the day’s homework assignment despite rolling blackouts. Other teachers now bring their for online lessons, lifting spirits and providing psychological support. Many teachers, like Popova, comfort their students despite their own traumatic losses.

Long-term displacement

As an since 2015, I have long observed the effects of armed conflict on Ukrainian children. After Russia first in 2014, regular to schools have been attributed by Ukrainians to Russian governmental efforts to sow fear.

Between that first invasion and the second in February 2022, armed conflict with Russia internally displaced Ukrainians and damaged . I have analyzed the impact of this on children for since Russia’s invasion began nine years ago. Still, these earlier challenges pale in comparison with what the Ukrainian educational system faces today.

Russia’s nationwide offensive against Ukraine in early 2022 led to the largest refugee flows in Europe since World War II. In the weeks following the invasion, nearly 16 million Ukrainians were driven from their homes to seek refuge and . Many of these were women and children, exacting a heavy toll on Ukraine’s female-majority teaching corps, as well as their students.

With large numbers of Ukraine’s young people at least temporarily resettled in primarily European countries, some teachers a surge in their students’ motivation linked to the structure of returning to their online Ukrainian schooling. “The children missed it (school) … because most of them were on the road for a long time. It was very emotionally draining, and when they returned to school, it was something they were used to,” one teacher .

Teaching online, again

Teachers around the world developed remote-teaching skills during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that war had driven their classes apart again, Ukrainian teachers adapted those skills to teach students across Europe and the world.

Some private online schools like made their materials available free of charge. This step allowed Ukrainian students to study at home if they could not otherwise access schooling because of the war. It also provided a way for Ukrainian refugee children to retain access to school materials in their native language. Still, new obstacles emerged.

Many countries that took in Ukrainian refugees required the children to attend local schools, even if they didn’t speak the local language. Some children thrived, like the young Ukrainians who their Welsh hosts by learning the local language in less than 12 weeks. Yet for many children, these host country efforts at integration created new problems. In my ongoing ethnographic research, Ukrainian parents described how these attendance requirements left their children frustrated. “The children just sit there not understanding anything all day,” one parent told me.

Parents told me that after their children finished these long days in a foreign school, many would begin their day’s real learning late at night. Parents said Ukrainian language materials gave children the chance to stay on schedule with their grade level back home. Failure to do so might further derail their future state exams and graduation dates.

By nightfall, however, children had lost their most productive educational hours. Harmful spirals soon followed. Even formerly top students experienced exhaustion-driven pressures to copy virtual assignments. Losing their joy of learning added to the strain of the war’s intense in these young lives.

A focus on education

Ukraine’s literacy rate is 99.8%, one of the , and education is a national point of . In wartime, Ukraine’s government is working to adapt its educational system to new realities.

Home schooling is permitted, so long as students can pass standardized tests. Still, many supervising parents are overburdened with the tasks of daily survival in the face of the Russian military’s relentless on the civilian population. One mother to a reporter that she soothes her children to sleep in bomb shelters before arranging shovels around them in case they become trapped in the rubble of a missile attack. Another mother told me she sends her young child to school with an emergency backpack filled with food, water and clothes in case he becomes trapped with his teachers.

The Russian military has also damaged or destroyed over , adding to construction burdens. When the school year in September, government data indicated that of Ukrainian schools nationwide were able to offer full-time, in-person instruction. Even those that were intact are now required to have a bomb shelter before they can hold in-person lessons. Major have rushed to build bomb shelters for schools, but, even so, many are simple, dirt-floor basements.

In addition, Russia’s intentional targeting of Ukraine’s electrical grid and civilian infrastructure poses new dangers to children’s health and schooling. Power outages have affected an estimated 10 million people, over one-quarter of the Ukrainian population. of Ukraine’s pupils are enrolled online and need electricity to attend classes and do schoolwork. Continued electrical outages would be a foreboding new hurdle.

Under occupation

The status of children’s education in Russian-controlled territories is even more alarming. Russia’s occupation has ushered in new forms of ideological in the classroom. Teachers in the liberated Kharkiv region have spoken of by the Russian military when they refused to teach their students that Ukraine was a territory of Russia.

Ukrainian teachers have also tried to their students from Russia’s forcible deportations of minors, a crime of under international law.

Courage has become synonymous with global descriptions of Ukrainian citizens enduring war, and teachers exemplify this everyday heroism. Still, Russia’s targeting of Ukraine’s youngest citizens unfortunately goes much deeper than the physical devastation of their , and . In a survey of existing educational challenges, one brave parent admitted, “I am really scared for the future of our children.”

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“We’re shell shocked,” said Andrew Stasiw, principal of the tiny Ukrainian Catholic high school in the East Village. “We have students breaking down and crying. We’re trying to run school as normally as possible … but it’s impossible not to be thinking of Ukraine.”

And because it is impossible not to be thinking of Ukraine, life inside the high school that opened in 1947 in the city’s Little Ukraine neighborhood has strayed far from class routines and schedules for its 80 students, their teachers and staff. 

For many at St. George Academy, the country currently under attack by Russia is home — and the pull toward home remains strong. 

A teacher is desperately trying to get her 11 grandchildren out of Ukraine. A guidance counselor’s job has shifted from discussions about college and career with students to discussions about life and death. 

Students are fearful Russian spies are hacking their laptops. A student’s escape from Ukraine meant leaving his father and friends behind to fight. Now the teen is grappling with guilt and worry — and the lingering question of whether he too should have stayed.

“I know at least four young men that are here … many of them who would go [to fight Russia]. Parents have reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, try to talk to them, and let them know that they can do more good from here,’” Stasiw said, “Parents have that knee jerk reaction to protect their children.”

Before the news broke, guidance counselor Nicole Giovenco’s day revolved around reading college applications and enrolling students in AP exams. Now, students come knocking on her door asking her to listen to their fears about the war.

“Some of them have brothers over there fighting,” said Giovenco. “They get that one phone call or WhatsApp message a day from them, if they’re lucky, and if they don’t they have no idea what to think.” 

There have been moments when Stasiw has broken down, tearing up about the crisis. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, has inspired him to stay strong for his students. 

“Leadership has to lead, and in a microcosm, I’m a leader of a very small school here,” he said.

Once, St. George Academy enrolled 900 Ukrainian students. Now just 40 percent are of Ukrainian heritage, though the school still emphasizes the country’s culture. Three Ukrainian refugee students have enrolled in recent days — and more are expected.

At the urging of his mother in New York who had wanted him to come live with her, Maksym Kosar, 17, packed an escape bag with dried food, water and his passport a week before his hometown, Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine, was invaded. The morning he heard bombs going off he fled on his own. He made his way out safely, but his father stayed behind to fight.

“My dad is in Ukraine because he couldn’t leave at the moment,” said Maksym during his first day at the school. “I will call him as soon as I get home.” 

School staff are also managing dire family affairs from afar: A Ukrainian teacher has taken days off, desperate to arrange the escape of her 11 grandchildren, who span 4 months to 11 years old.

“She’s wrecked,” was all Stasiw would say about the situation.

Irene Saviano, who teaches art and works in the office, was excited to start working on this year’s pysanky — Ukrainian Easter eggs — with her students, but the project has been put on hold because everyone at St. George Academy is focused on the war.

Ukrainian culture, from learning about the eggs to singing traditional hymns, is woven into the school culture. Now, said Saviano, those traditions and lessons have taken on a new importance, giving students a renewed sense of pride.

“Everybody’s singing Ukrainian,” Saviano said. “They don’t refuse it. They actually welcome it.”

As Stasiw popped in and out of classrooms, students ran up to him eager to share updates. Many found it too painful and dangerous to speak about the war and, in Ukrainian, told their principal why.

“They’re afraid the interview will get them in trouble with Putin,” Stasiw translated.

Walking down a hallway adorned with blue and yellow posters, Stasiw was stopped by a student with another fear: He thought his laptop’s security had been compromised by Russian spies. 

“There are threats of cyber attacks happening in this neighborhood,” he shared, telling the student he would take a look.

Stasiw said it’s been hard to know exactly what to do and say to students, so he prepared a presentation “to explain to them what’s going on, especially for the non-Ukrainian students. 

“I talked about how we have to be compassionate and how Ukrainians do not hate Russians,” he said. 

For students like Janna, 17, who lived in Ukraine until she was nine-years-old and still has family there, discussing the war is helping her cope.

“It feels like a nightmare,” she said. “Raising awareness is good.”

Sparking discussion and keeping his culture close, Oleh Holintayy, 15, like many other St. George students, has swapped out his uniform for a vyshyvanka, a traditional embroidered Ukrainian shirt.

“This vyshyvanka was made by my great-grandmother, who’s still in Ukraine,” said Holintayy. The teen, who emigrated from Ukraine when he was three, has slept little in recent weeks and become obsessed with checking his phone for updates.

Just like other students at Saint George, seniors Sophia Klyuba and Vitalina Voitenko can only think about the safety of their loved ones in Ukraine.

“My whole family except for my dad is in Ukraine. My mom, my grandma, sister, nephew, aunt and uncle,” Sophia, 17. “You cannot really focus on anything else and think about anything else… You call your family to know that they’re still alive and well. I really want to be with them right now even though it’s very dangerous … I cannot imagine anything happening to them.”

St. George students and staff have looked for ways to show support for their homeland — from singing the Ukrainian national anthem in front of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at their church, to sending messages to soldiers. Stasiw told students they could also help by spreading the word about the charity St. George Academy partnered with, , which raises funds to send over medical supplies.

Together the students traveled to Washington D.C. to protest the war, toting the signs they assembled inside their small, proud-to-be Ukrainian high school.

Many public employee pensions, including those covering teachers, are significantly exposed to a Russian financial market that has taken a drubbing in response to Western sanctions this month. Within days of the Russian invasion, Colorado’s state pension fund removed over $7 million held in Sberbank, a substantially state-owned Russian bank. Legislators in Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey that would push state treasurers to liquidate Russian holdings, while governors and other officials in Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Washington State, California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut have advocated either for full-scale divestment or reviews of their portfolios. Pension funds in and are following suit. 

In a letter to his state’s three largest retirement systems, that their fiduciary duties to beneficiaries “demand that you act to address Russia’s aggressions and immediately restrict Russian access to California’s capital and investments.”

The sudden push has been framed as a blow against military aggression. But disentangling public funds from foreign entities in countries like Russia may also pose further challenges to their short-run health of already stressed retirement systems. Given the ruble’s precipitous decline in value, states must decide whether to sell off their control over assets ; with the restrictions placed on stock trading of Russian entities, some investors are . And that’s without considering the logistical challenges of identifying and severing ties to foreign investments in the first place.

Chad Aldeman, the policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said that teachers might be surprised to learn that their retirement contributions were mingled with assets overseas.

“I would say that, through their pension funds, teachers are invested in far more exotic assets and investments than the typical 401(k) investor,” Aldeman said. “There are all kinds of different financial strategies they’re pursuing, and they’re more aggressive about finding different types of investments, like lumber or coffee or international avenues like Russia.”

The dilemma showcases . Increasingly, major American investors — including pensions, but also 401(k) plans and endowments — have tended to favor positions in “passive” funds that track stock indexes rather than paying managers to pick winners for them. The switch comes in response to the high fees and disappointing performance resulting from “active” investments in the past, such as the Alabama retirement system’s in a now-defunct chain of movie theaters. By contrast, Nevada’s public employee pension a few years ago, shrinking its investment office to just one man whose professed strategy was to do “as little as possible.”

But Aldeman observed that many public pensions still have considerable sums tied into such investments, including those in foreign markets.

“They’re stretching to hit an investment target, and to do that, they’re trying to find the absolute best investments out there,” he said.

Moving away from that posture, even in response to global condemnation of Russia’s actions, may come at a price. As a case in point, the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement Fund in late February for $12.4 million. That was over $3 million less than it cost to buy them in 2017. 

That figure recedes a bit in the context of . But the system is already , and such losses may contribute to the perception of mismanagement. Ted Siedle is a pensions expert and writer who has authored investigations into retirement systems in several states, including commissioned by the state teachers’ union. In an interview, he cited the example of Ohio’s pension fund, which lost over the last decade in a deal with a Texas private equity firm. 

“That’s not a whole lot for a $100 billion pension fund to lose, but the people whose money it is didn’t look at it that way,” Siedle said. “The teachers were pissed! That’s money that could have gone to their cost-of-living adjustments. And for some pensions, the Russian holdings could be a significant amount.”

A key problem, Siedle argued, is that the boards of pension plans are typically filled with laymen with insignificant financial expertise, like municipal leaders and retired public employees. They are also not governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the main federal body of regulations over private pensions. As a consequence, the systems are viewed by Wall Street intermediaries like hedge funds as “the dumbest investors out there,” he said.

Even amid a wave of divestment from Russian industry, it may be difficult for teachers’ pension funds to distance themselves. For one thing, Aldeman noted, they could face “lock up fees” from their managers for canceling their investments early; those might come on top of financial losses from selling assets whose market value is plummeting.

Beyond that, , lower transparency requirements outside ERISA will mean that pension funds may find it difficult to even identify where their money is invested. In other words, not only are teachers unaware of the scope of their exposure to the Russian economy, but so are the pension systems themselves.

“There’s no accountability. Who’s even going to tell them? The money manager would have to honestly tell the pension fund, and then the pension fund would have to honestly tell the public. The chances of that happening are slim to none.”