At midday in Zaporizhzhia, an air-raid siren sounds — and schoolchildren don’t run home, but head down a staircase to where, several metres underground, desks stand ready, a blackboard is in place, and its own ventilation system hums quietly. For thousands of children in this frontline city, this is no longer an extraordinary event but an ordinary September morning. Behind that ordinariness lie months of concreting, design work, and projects delivered on deadline.
In a few weeks, a new school year begins in Zaporizhzhia region, and whether children will be able to attend classes in person this summer is being decided not only by teachers but, above all, by builders. At a briefing on the region’s preparations for the 2026/2027 school year, Olena Kazannikova, director of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration’s Department of Education and Science, outlined which facilities have been completed in time — and the figures speak for themselves. For local authorities and contractors working on frontline projects, this amounts to an interim progress report: how much has been finished, how much remains underway, and what timelines are realistic when you’re building under shellfire.
Underground Schools in Zaporizhzhia: The Numbers from the Briefing
The key points from the briefing:
- the region has 276 school shelters in total;
- 262 of them have undergone major renovation over the past four years;
- thanks to this expanded network of protective facilities, nearly 20,000 children attend in-person classes every day;
- six underground schools are being completed in time for the new school year — three entirely new facilities whose construction began this year, plus three more that started earlier and are now nearing completion;
- starting in August, summer education programmes are being launched for senior pupils.
“Over four years, we have renovated 262 shelters. It’s an enormous expense, but we have to do it, because behind every one of these facilities is a real child,” Kazannikova said.
Why Repairing School Shelters Is Construction in Its Own Right
Zaporizhzhia’s underground schools have long stopped being a temporary wartime fix. They are a distinct category of capital construction, with their own design codes and requirements for ventilation, power supply, and autonomy in the event of outages. Building one of these facilities is harder and slower than building an ordinary school: underground structures face different load calculations, different concrete-pouring logistics, and different handover timelines. That’s exactly why, of the six facilities the region hopes to finish before September 1, three are still under construction — the schedule here is dictated not by the wish to make the school bell, but by the physics of the construction process itself.
What This Means for the Construction Industry
For contractors, this is a telling example of how the very meaning of “school construction” has changed over the years of war. Designing and building protective facilities has become a distinct area of public procurement, and companies experienced in underground structures and engineering protection have become a sought-after resource in frontline regions. Zaporizhzhia is just one region, but its experience is already being studied elsewhere, where the same question arises ahead of the new school year: how to give children both a classroom and safety at the same time. For public procurers, this is also a lesson for the future: major shelter repairs or the construction of an underground school should be planned not a few weeks before the bell rings, but as a multi-year infrastructure project with its own budget, contractor, and margin of time for unforeseen circumstances.
While some measure these shelters in square metres, others measure them in the children’s smiles returning to ordinary school life. And that is perhaps the most accurate indicator that the country’s reconstruction is happening not only on major highways, but also underground, several metres below the surface, where someone’s first September assembly is right now being completed.
Source: ZNAJ.UA
