Ukraine War Day #150: Magnet School In Energodar

Dear Readers:

Today we have another “educational” story, this time about a school in Energodar. The reporter is Anton Nikitin. Setting the scene: Recall that Zaporozhie Oblast is split in two horizontally, by the Dnepr River, with the Ukrainians controlling the area on the Right Bank, and the Russians the Left Bank This map shows Energodar (“Enerhodar”), and its relation to other major cities such as Nikolaev, Kherson, Krivoi Rog, Melitopol, and Zaporozhie itself. And, by the way, I am giving notice to my readers that I will none of this North, South, East, West thing when it comes to discussing the River. So many bloggers are using those words, instead of the traditional “Right Bank”, “Left Bank”, thing. Maybe they think their readers will be confused (thinking “Left” must mean West, when it’s usually the opposite), and I admit it can be confusing, but all it takes is a simple explanation: Right/Left is from the point of view of the River itself, as it barrels down the countryside. It began its journey way up North somewhere as a Russian stream. Imagine that the River has a head and arms as it swims along. As it flows towards the Black Sea, everything on its “right hand” is the Right Bank, and everything on its “left hand” is the Left Bank. Got that?

The reason why this is important, and I’m not just being a doofus about it, is because this River winds a lot, sometimes it runs horizontal North/South and then it turns vertical again, so East/West, and sometimes it’s diagonal. I found it awfully confusing, trying to follow some of the battles, when internet bloggers/mappers were talking about “Russians trying to cross river north to south”, say, when a little further away, the River is more vertical, so what is north and what is south? Which is the whole reason why people invented the “Right/Left” bank terminology in the first place, because the orientation is completely independent of the topography or windings of the water, it is guided only by the vector of direction. QED.

School #2 is #1

But on to our story. The city of Energodar literally means “Gift of Energy”, it is obviously a Soviet city, founded in 1970, and built to service the Thermal Power Station. A decade later, the Zaporozhie Nuclear Power Plant was built side by side with the older Thermal Plant. Both power plants are still functional (although the Ukrainians keep trying to blow them up now) and serve as the major employers for a city of some 50,000 people.

Energodar is the kind of town that glows in the dark!

Given that power-plant employees frequently have children, there is a need for schools. The discussion turns to School #2, whose Principal is a man named Vadim Karetnikov.

Mr. Karetnikov is busy preparing his school, and the teachers under his command, for the start of the new school year, which arrives on September 1: “We are going through an accreditation process which will bring our school up to Russian standards. We are currently preparing our statute (mission statement? Russian устав) and other required documentation. We are also selecting pedagogues who are appropriate for the Russian system of education.” Some of the new pedagogues may be transferring in from Crimea. Every day new teachers are arriving, who are willing to teach according to the Russian curriculum.

According to Karetnikov, the Russians have promised to deliver all the necessary textbooks in the first half of August; this will give the teachers a couple of weeks to write up their lesson plans, and the aministrations to organize staff schedules. “The school is built to handle 1030 pupils, and I think we will pull in that many during the school year. At the current moment, in Energodar, we, School #2, are the leader, we were the first to start the accreditation process, we were also the first to organize a summer school for 140 children, and we already had two sessions. The instructors are looking to us first [for possible employment]. The situation is this: in the Ukrainian system of education there were many teachers who were true specialists and pedagogues of the highest order; and yet they were sacked by the [Ukrainian] authorities because their Ukrainian was not good enough to teach in the Ukrainian language. These teachers are coming to us, and we are very happy to have them.”

Children in Zaporozhie are eager to learn.

Karetnikov clarified, that starting with this year, instruction itself will resume in the Russian language. However, children may choose to continue learning Ukrainian, under the rubric “native language”. Those teachers whose Ukrainian is good enough to instruct in it, will remain in the institution, as necessary specialists.

Karetnikov is proud to claim that School #2 will be a “magnet” school of sorts. Well, the Russian word is опорная which means “foundation” or “reference”. The term “magnet” is probably an Americanism, but I think it sounds funny because electricty and magnetism… well, you know… Anyhow, Karetnikov is a pioneer, he says other schools in the area will follow the example of School #2: “The system will be much as it is in Moscow where, frequently the entire [school] administration sits in one building, and then there are several corpuses, each of which is a fully-functional school, spread around around the region. This format was suggested to us by our Russian colleagues, during a visit to Energodar in July by the Russian Minister of Education Sergei Kravtsov. [yalensis: He’s the guy with the Beatle haircut who looks sort of like Engisn Chekov from Star Trek.] At the current moment we have the situation where we are the base school, and the other schools [in Energodar] will be our filials.”

In conclusion: Way to go! Nice piece of Office Politics there, Vadim. You just got yourself promoted over all the other school principals in the city. Well played, heh heh!