“There is no huge support from the governments” – about Optima School with Yuriy Balkin

School must go on

"The German Foundations helped us to support the Ukrainian students in the hard times." (The English interview starts at 3:10) According to current statistics, each German high school has enrolled between 10 and 30 Ukrainian students. Many principals have done this without additional staff and have often exceeded the maximum class sizes allowed by law. This raises the question of how well or poorly Ukrainian students are able to follow the lessons when they speak little German and are forced by German school law to be present in the German school. At the beginning of the war and the wave of refugees, Optima School tried to offer supplementary lessons for Ukrainian students. With live lessons and on-demand learning content in Ukrainian. In the morning, Ukrainian children could have learned at the German school and in the afternoon, they could have consolidated content in their own language or learned Ukraine-specific topics such as history, geography and social studies. Unfortunately, there was no longer much talk about the Optima School in Germany, which Stephan took as the occasion to talk to Yuriy Balkin. Yuriy is Chief Strategy Officer of Optima Education Group which operates Optima School, the first and the largest Ukrainian K-12 distance learning school. – No state funding in Germany – As Yuriy explains in this episode of “School must go on” Optima has been running reliably for years and is easily scalable. Optima School is in the same situation as many EdTechs in the education sector: There is no state funding, because stakeholders such as the ministry of education do not want to support "for-profit" companies, even in times of acute crisis. This is also how the documentation of the rejection of cooperation between KMK and Optima can be read: No interest in cooperating with companies with the excuse that it is not that easy to procure. Instead, the SAP Foundation and the Bosch Foundation stepped in and helped more than 100,000 Ukrainian students gain access to the Optima platform at short notice. Yuri Balkin also talks about the background and concept of Optima School and how they are currently trying to continue to provide education to as many Ukrainian children as possible, regardless of location, economic circumstances, and government support.