School furniture
School furniture for bomb shelters
The Russian troops have destroyed hundreds of school buildings. The internally displaced children still need to be educated. In addition, schools must provide classrooms in bomb-proof basements in order to be allowed to hold face-to-face lessons. If this is not possible, the school remains closed. Pro Ukraina supplies school furniture from various sources to Ukraine on an ongoing basis.
Background
It is not enough that the COVID crisis has thrown all school lessons around the world off track. For Ukraine, it was seamlessly followed by the heinous attack by the army of the Russian Federation, which has caused and continues to cause enormous damage. In the event of an air raid, schools that want to offer face-to-face lessons must be able to evacuate all classes to a bomb-proof shelter within a reasonable period of time. Some schools are only able to do this with half of their classes. In this case, face-to-face lessons take place on a rotational basis. One week the classes of group A, the next week the classes of group B, and so on. The other half of the lessons take place online.
Other schools can only offer tuition on-line , simply because they do not have the means to evacuate classes to a safe place in the event of an alarm.
Air alerts are sounded daily in almost all regions of the country.
The fact that the quality of the education on-line is suffering extremely was already evident during the COVID crisis. In Ukraine, this situation will continue for years to come. Ukraine needs an enormous amount of additional school furniture to be able to set up such classrooms in air raid shelters. What's more, many additional pupils from the Russian-occupied territories are joining the schools in the rest of the country, which in turn requires additional infrastructure.
Implementation
Fortunately, Pro Ukraina is contacted time and again with corresponding offers. We have already delivered hundreds of tables, school desks and chairs from school buildings to the warehouse in Uzhhorod, from where they are distributed throughout the country.
We were recently able to take over all the canteen furniture from a cantonal school whose school building is being renovated. This came at just the right time, because the rear axle of a lorry had to be loaded with several tonnes of weight in order to be able to pull our large generator for Kramatorsk to Uzhhorod. Without a load, the rear axle would swerve in a bend when pulling an 18-tonne generator. (See also 630 kVA Generator for Kramatorsk and Blog
Support possibilities
We now have the opportunity to store school furniture together with our other aid supplies until we have collected enough material to justify the transport costs.
If you have school furniture that needs to be replaced, please contact us.
For material that we collect ourselves, we charge a contribution towards expenses, which is used in full to finance such transport. We are guided by the usual rates of 5 CHF per chair and 15 CHF per table respectively school-desk. This is roughly equivalent to the disposal costs, whereby the furniture is used for a humanitarian purpose instead of being destroyed.