UKRAINE, PECHENIHY, Jan 24 — A new underground education center for children opened in Pechenihy, a village in Kharkiv Oblast, on January 22, charity fund SavED told Gwara Media. 

“We’ve managed to turn an old neglected basement into real underground classrooms, comfortable and bright, the ones that look like places for studying, not just facilities for staying during an air raid alarm,” says savED’s co-founder Anna Putsova. 

Pechenihy is a village to the southeast of Kharkiv, and, like most of the region’s settlements, it’s being targeted by Russian air attacks. For 750 children remaining there, no option of offline education is accessible. 

Oksana Pomyliaiko, director of the local lyceum, says that for the youngest students, learning in the underground center would become their first-ever experience of systemic offline education. 

The overall cost of constructing the space was over ~$70,754 (3.4 million hryvnias): $7,000 (300,000 hryvnias) came from the local budget, the rest have been donated. 

As of December 2024, since the beginning of the full-scale war, Russian troops have damaged over half of Kharkiv’s educational facilities, including 134 schools out of 184 and 109 kindergartens out of 205.

Kharkiv plans to build three more underground schools to meet the demand for safe hybrid education for 53,000 schoolchildren. 

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