"Ironically, those who came to the school for evacuees in the first stage of the war were students who were looking for company and were less interested in studies,” says Dr. Maggie Mualem, the biotechnology coordinator at Ort Danziger High School in Kiryat Shmona.
Mualem also currently serves as a teacher at the school for the children of northern evacuees that opened near Tel Aviv.
“The stronger students stayed in the hotels because it is impossible to study in such classes regularly.” Mualem adds that “they understand that their matriculation exams may not turn out as they hoped, and they understand that the three hours a week that I teach them via Zoom is not the same as the eight face-to-face hours that they would normally receive. Soon these students will go to screening exams for positions in the army. They will find themselves sitting disheartened next to those who did not have their lives completely disrupted and were able to study properly in high school. When these evacuated students begin studying at university, who will care then that four years ago they were sitting in a hotel and could not study properly?”
Mualem was one of the main speakers at the Conference on Education in War and the War on Education, which was recently held in Tel Aviv. The conference dealt with the greatest challenges and problems in the field of education that emerged immediately on the morning of Sunday, October 8. The gap between the periphery and the center of Israel existed long before this war.
Periphery and displacement as widening disparity
It has now become an even more acute problem as all of the evacuated students are from the periphery, from the surrounding area of Gaza and the North of Israel. These issues combined with a very concerned look forward to the future were at the heart of the conference, which was organized by the nonprofit organizations, Kedma and Village Way Educational Initiatives.
Approximately 48,000 children and teenagers of school age were evacuated from the South and the North. Together with their families, they evacuated to no less than 377 evacuee absorption centers in 54 different local authorities across the country.
Perhaps because of this dispersion, the Education Ministry does not have up-to-date information regarding almost 8,000 of the evacuated students, accounting for 17% of all evacuated children. Are these children in school, and if so, where?
Prof. Orit Hazan from the Faculty of Science and Technology Education at the Technion, who disclosed the data at the conference, clarifies that even at the end of three months from the outbreak of the war (the validity date of the data presented), the state has only partial information regarding the educational service provided to evacuated students.
Challenges for displaced students
Mualem presented the variety of problems and challenges faced by displaced students, parents, and teachers using the case study of Kiryat Shmona. After a first period of disorientation and unsuccessful attempts for various reasons to integrate the city’s students into Tel Aviv schools, a special school was opened for the evacuated students at a shopping and entertainment mall near Tel Aviv.
This school reflects an extraordinary mobilization of the entire system, first and foremost of the teachers evacuated from the city and its surroundings, who constitute the main artery of the teaching staff. The latter joined a new professional framework at short notice, with staff members, colleagues, and administrators whom they did not necessarily know, and were also usually required to take upon themselves extra subjects that they had not taught before.
Mainly, these teachers were required to serve as emotional support for their students who had been living with their families for weeks in hotel rooms or other temporary residences. Mualem notes that “often the only private place these evacuated students have at the moment is their pillow.”
The evacuated teachers do all this while they face all the difficulties of citizens who were evacuated from their homes in a panic, and in many cases concern for spouses left behind or in military reserve service. The teachers must, of course, deal with the anxieties of their own children as well.
With all the goodwill and dedication that exists in the high schools for the evacuees, these makeshift schools suffer from many serious issues. The buildings are far from well-suited for educational purposes. Classes are extremely heterogeneous with almost daily turnover. Students with special needs find themselves learning alongside gifted students. All this causes extreme instability and teachers find it nearly impossible to maintain any kind of consistent study routine.
The problem is particularly acute for evacuated high school students, a quarter of whom from Kiryat Shmona have not been placed in any framework since the evacuation from the city. For many of them, learning for matriculation exams stopped abruptly, and was replaced by wandering in the streets and all kinds of other very undesirable phenomena.
The increasing role of NGOs
Since October 7, nongovernmental educational organizations have been stepping up and contributing more than ever before. In the second week of the war, the nonprofit organization, Kedma established a special learning center for students evacuated from Sderot, in one of the hotels at the Dead Sea. Based on its successful operation, Kedma later established additional learning centers for other students who were evacuated to the area.
Village Way Educational Initiatives founded the Pathfinders project, which aims to personally empower evacuated students and help them build a constructive narrative of this traumatic period. In the spirit of the veteran and esteemed educator Dr. Chaim Peri, each of the participating students is encouraged to do acts of tikkun olam (societal repair) within their communities and to create a personal photography project (“the victory album”). “If there are seven words that deserve to be engraved today, they are ‘growing with the size of the hour,’” Peri recently wrote.
There are obviously no magic solutions for such a sudden and traumatic crisis, such as the one that befell the education system amid the general national crisis. The Education Ministry, it must be said, has done a fair amount, but almost five months since the war began, the ongoing struggle with the evacuation of 2.5% of Israeli students needs improvement.
At the conference, the question was raised, what would happen in the scenario of a tsunami or an earthquake, God forbid, with evacuations on a much larger scale? Will the Education Ministry be able to apply the critical lessons that are currently being learned, to effectively manage the system based on a complete and reliable database and to allow a continuum of studies for the majority of the students in the face of a large-scale natural disaster? This is the challenge ahead.
It is impossible to end without another word about the evacuated teachers, those who, after finishing an exhausting day of work at the school for evacuated students near Tel Aviv, and many others like it, dedicate hours of their time and energy to afternoons of distance learning on Zoom with their students from their original hometown school and classroom.
As for the question of what motivates these teachers, despite all the objective difficulties, Mualem answers that “teachers are dedicated to their students. They understand that this is a national mission, and they don’t want to see their students fail their matriculation exams after all the years they spent together.”
“And… we are waiting to be noticed as well.” says Mualem of the evacuated teachers, “To also be asked how we are doing.”
The writer is the CEO of Village Way Educational Initiatives, which works to change Israeli society through education that is empowering and creates a sense of belonging.