In this webinar we learned about the myriad challenges that Hope School endures due to the occupation and the impossibility of students and teachers even getting to the school safely.

We were joined by the Director, Khader Saba, science teacher Ms. Manal Khoury, and Ms. Masa, a 10th-grade student who shared the difficulties in providing a decent education for students given the location of the school being surrounded by checkpoints that are willfully opened and closed without explanation or schedule — contributing to endless uncertainties about what each day will bring. Social and emotional challenges are considerable. Teachers must have broad skills, not just conveying the material but tending to a traumatized student population requires great care.

Palestinian youth are deprived of opportunities to succeed in life that we take for granted in the US or the West. Hurdles are numerous and extensive and the occupying military continues to conger new and insidious ways of preventing Palestinian youth from achieving success on the land of their ancestors. However, Hope School continues to find a path forward and graduates a cohort each year, and set them up for a much more successful future than would otherwise have been available.