Photo courtesy of ISM Palestine on Flickr

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a story for a class on the situation of schools in the Gaza strip. I was astounded to find how dire the situation is there for schoolkids.

“There is a great deal of difficulty concentrating because there’s a lot of trauma,” said Saahir Lone, a New York-based employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which runs 221 schools for 200,000 children in Gaza. “It will be some time before some kind of routine can be established.”

Gaza’s educational system—already in a dire state before the recent hostilities—is all but crippled. Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza killed 400 children and injured many, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. With empty chairs haunting classrooms, schools damaged and an estimated 14 percent of all buildings in Gaza destroyed, the United Nations says that there is no easy way to establish a normal learning environment for students.

Limits that Israel is putting on aid delivered to Gaza mean that even hefty international donations may not be enough to restore Gaza’s infrastructure anytime soon, including its schools.

When I spoke to Lone at the end of January, he told me that workers in Gaza’s field offices had been working 18-hour days and are so busy responding to urgent matters that they have not had time to do thorough assessments of the damage to the school system. But while he said that it is difficult “to make hard and fast conclusions,” he noted that restrictions on imports into Gaza before the recent violence had included paper and light bulbs—crucial supplies for any classroom.

Still, UNRWA is taking several steps to get students studying again. The most pressing need is making up for lost time.

“We’ve lost a month in the academic calendar,” Lone said. To counter that, UNRWA is cutting recreation time—a bitter measure for students already facing high levels of stress. “To some people that might not sound significant, but recreation is key for kids living in a conflict,” Lone said. The schools are also looking into ways to condense material, which Lone called “unfortunate”, and offering some remedial education.

Gaza schools are also attempting to offer stress counselors for children returning from weeks living with near round-the-clock air raids and shooting. But the UNRWA counseling program is severely understaffed—there is only one counselor at each school, or about one for every two thousand students.

Even before the recent bombardment of Gaza, there have been troubling downward trends in Palestinian Territory schools for several years. Schools in Gaza recorded failure rates of 40 to 50 percent in 2006 and 2007, according to UNRWA.

That, Lone said, “has been unheard of in the refugee community because education is very highly valued. We described it at that time as an educational crisis.”

“That’s not for an abstract reason,” Lone added. “It’s because of closure and confinement in the Gaza Strip—people can’t go in and out,” and hopelessness is on the rise. Israel pulled settlers out of Gaza in 2005, but its army has encircled the territory since then and blockaded it for much of the time.

The educational systems in Gaza and the West Bank have traditionally performed better than those in other countries with similar levels of human development, as measured by the UN Development Program (UNDP). The adult literacy rate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories was 92.4 percent and the enrolment rate in primary, secondary and tertiary education was 80.2 percent in 2006, the last year for which figures are available.

UNRWA schools have attained good statistics with a constant scarcity of resources, teachers and space. Schools are so overcrowded in Gaza that children attend classes in two different shifts—one in the morning and one in the evening.
But the current mood in Gaza suggests that the energy and inspiration needed to make do with little may be fading.

“Nothing has returned to normal,” said Ahmad Abu Hamda, a Gazan freelance journalist and news producer for National Public Radio, in a phone interview two weeks ago. “People are trying, but this is impossible with the siege that is being implemented on the Gaza Strip.”

As much as supply shortages and ruined buildings, Lone suggested that it is this psychic weight of war that could hamper a recovery for Gaza’s children.

“All these factors combine to devastate their prospects,” he said. There is a risk “that we will lose a generation.”