Alina Petriv, a 12-year-old undergoing treatment in Ukraine’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, has to stand in the classroom when attending lessons because of a rare spinal problem.
But that doesn’t stop her from diving into her studies in between the treatments.
However, Kyiv-based Okhmatdyt is a rare exception in Ukraine, where most of the country’s 90 children’s hospitals don’t provide classes.
In Okhmatdyt, the initiative called School of Superheroes set up classrooms to teach kids of all ages and, most importantly, foster their hunger for knowledge.
“The School of Superheroes is about believing that a child will recover,” the founder of the initiative, Yevhenia Smirnova told the Kyiv Post. “Whatever happens, we are preparing them for their future life.”
More than one million children are hospitalized every year in Ukraine. Some of them may spend as many as 13 years fighting disease on a hospital bed, missing a big part of their school life and, in many ways, a normal childhood. And, sadly, some of them don’t live long enough to see any graduation day.
Although access to education is a basic right under Ukraine’s Constitution and guaranteed to everyone, it fails to be delivered to children in hospitals.
Beginning
The history of the school dates back to 2014. Back then, Smirnova was involved in the art field heading one of the Kyiv’s galleries until she was invited to create some paintings on the walls of Okhmatdyt with a group of volunteers. There, Smirnova says she was the only one who agreed to meet kids at the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) department, and the fact that others refused struck her.
“They were such incredible kids,” Smirnova said. “I couldn’t understand what all those people were afraid of.”
That happened about the same time that Smirnova was falling in love with a man who had HIV and whom she married. She says the circumstances provided her with powerful motivation to help.
That’s when she recalled her own experience as a child with multiple health issues who had to skip school in order to get treatment.
“It was difficult to return to the learning process,” Smirnova says.
The founder of the School of Superheroes initiative, Yevhenia Smirnova, sits in one of their classrooms in Ukraine’s biggest hospital for children on Sept. 9, 2019 in Kyiv. (Volodymyr Petrov)
She soon found out that some of the kids at Okhmadyt, which treats more than 25,000 children yearly, have no other choice but to learn basic literacy from nurses and their parents.
So Smirnova decided to change that.
At first, she organized workshops for children at Okhmatdyt and, by 2017, she established a full-fledged school there funded by foreign donors and Ukraine-based companies.
Superpowers
Today the School of Superheroes has two classrooms in the HIV and toxicology departments.
Since the children are perceived as superheroes, at school they are offered to acquire so-called superpowers. Smirnova says that they renamed all the school subjects after the superpowers they grant. For instance, mathematics here is called the ability to see the essence of things.
The founder says that they wanted their school to not remind children of either the hospital or a conventional school. For that reason, there are bright-colored wall paintings in their classrooms, lots of stickers, badges and other attributes that make the process more entertaining.
“A hospital is not a place that pleases and, with school, the first contact is not always positive,” Smirnova said.
Today up to 180 children from eight departments attend their school every week. There’s always a rotation because some of them get treatment over a short period of time and leave the hospital, while others might have unpredictable conditions that don’t allow them to attend classes.
Any kid undergoing treatment at Okhmatdyt can join the school. The only condition is their doctor’s approval. However, those who aren’t recommended to leave their wards can still take private lessons that the School of Superheroes arranges for them. For those who have to stay isolated from strangers, they arrange classes online.
Smirnova says their school gives children freedom and they always choose carrots rather than sticks.
In the classroom, children can take any seat they like and lay down on the sofa if they don’t feel well. On each desk, there’s a pyramid with three sides painted in different colors. Children are encouraged to use it to show how well they understand the topic that a teacher is explaining.
Petriv says that what she likes about the School of Superheroes the most is that their lessons are unlike regular ones and she always leaves the classroom in a better mood.
“All the teachers are so kind, they don’t give marks or scold,” Petriv told the Kyiv Post.
As Petriv battles with her disease for over a year now, it’s her second time in Okhmatdyt. Her mom, Liudmyla, says that the school helped her daughter to go through the hard times.
“She didn’t feel useless or abandoned,” Liudmyla Petriv told the Kyiv Post. “Children aren’t detached from the learning process and communication and can get the same education as healthy students get,” she added.
Goals
The School of Superheroes offers classes in eight basic subjects, including biology, mathematics and history. Their teachers are volunteers who each dedicate one day a week to teaching children at Okhmatdyt.
Smirnova says that, although they need more teachers, the school places high demands on them and doesn’t settle for less than its standards.
“If a person comes for any other reason than to help children, we refuse to cooperate,” Smirnova says.
One of those who matched the requirements is retired mathematics teacher Olena Kyrkevych, who has 45 years of teaching experience.
All the teachers stick to the plan issued by the Ministry of Education and Science. However, Kyrkevych says that children often have gaps in knowledge, so she adjusts the program to the school’s reality.
Kyrkevych says that it’s harder to organize and interest students in Okhmatdyt, which is why she uses her entertaining techniques to make classes attractive. The teacher compares the coordinate system with the populst naval battle game and explains fractions using hematogen bars.
“We need to maintain their knowledge and explain new material, but the main goal is to distract them from their diseases,” Kyrkevych told the Kyiv Post.
The School of Superheroes aims to expand the number of teachers, subjects and classrooms and open a library and an outside playground at Okhamtdyt.
They also share the initiative’s concept as a franchise. Two more schools are preparing to open at two hospitals in Zhytomyr, a city of 265,000 people located about 140 kilometers west of Kyiv.
And Smirnova says they hope to have more of those in coming years.
“We want every child to have access to quality education not only in Okhmatdyt, but also in every oblast and city hospital,” Smirnova said.
