The last time Faida Pierre, 10, went to school, her mother found her stranded on the roof of the school’s building, barefoot and crying, while a gang stormed the surrounding downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhood.
The principal and teachers had called parents to pick up their children as the sound of gunfire grew louder and armed men approached. Then everyone ran for their lives. Faida ended up alone.
“There was a panic,” Faida recalled, “and people were running out of the building. People were saying that the bandits had attacked the neighborhood, so kids were trying to reach the rooftop.”
That was a year ago, and, like some 300,000 other children across Haiti, Faida, who was in third grade, stopped going to school.
Robbed of their education and their prospects for the future, legions of Haitian children are the overlooked victims of the gang violence that has crippled the country: homeless, hungry and often targeted for recruitment by the armed groups they fled.
Many schools remain shuttered because they are in gang-occupied areas. Others have become de facto shelters, as more than one million people — roughly 10 percent of the country’s population — have abandoned their homes during gang takeovers of their communities.
After a surge of violence crippled Port-au-Prince, the capital, last February, nearly 15,000 households descended on government and school buildings for protection, according to UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s advocacy organization, which has also tracked the number of children not attending school.
Even families whose schools remained open said they had not been able to enroll their children because they lacked money for school fees, uniforms and supplies. Most children in Haiti attend private schools, but public schools also charge modest fees that many families whose homes and businesses were burned to the ground can no longer afford.
At the same time, tens of thousands of children have abandoned Port-au-Prince for safer places elsewhere in Haiti, overwhelming schools in several communities.
Schools have also had to cope with a plunge in the numbers of teachers and staff, many of whom either were killed or left the country. Haiti’s schools have lost about one-fourth of their teachers, according to government officials.
Besides educational losses, being out of school makes them vulnerable to joining the very armed groups wreaking havoc on their lives. Experts estimate that up to half of gang members are minors.
In the province that includes Port-au-Prince, 77,000 ninth graders showed up for the statewide final exam at the end of the 2023-24 school year, a drop of 10,000 from the previous year, the Education Ministry said. As a result, officials estimate that some 130,000 students in the capital region withdrew from the school system’s 13 grades last academic year.
Officials said they had been unable to make a full assessment of how many students dropped out this year.
Faida may not go to school, but she lives in one. Faida’s father was killed in a gang attack, her mother said, so she and Faida joined the nearly 5,000 people living at the Lycée Marie Jeanne school in Port-au-Prince.
When a New York Times reporter and photographer visited the school in the fall, Faida and her mother, Faroline Parice, were sleeping outdoors in a courtyard awash in mosquitoes and rainwater.
“At night, sometimes she wakes up, and she’s crying,” Ms. Parice said. “She asks when she will go back to school.”
Wudley Beauge, 17, and his 15-year-old sister, Sadora Damus, were also there and have missed more than a year of school.
Sadora dreams of becoming a police chief, but would need to pass the ninth-grade exams to enter the police academy, and she left school after eighth grade. Wudley, who missed 10th grade, wants to be an auto mechanic.
They sleep on a classroom floor with about a dozen other people.
“My first priority would be to go back to school because when I’m sharing my goals with people who are older than I am, they say, ‘If you want to be a mechanic, you must go back to school,’” Wudley said. “My family doesn’t have money to send me to mechanic school.”
His mother, Soirilia Elpenord, 38, wants her children in school, but with her cosmetics shop and home set ablaze by gang members, the mother of four said finding shelter ranked higher than learning.
“School? That’s not a priority,” she said. “My priority is to survive. The main priority for all parents in Haiti right now is how to survive.”
UNICEF has worked with the Haitian government to provide cash assistance to needy families, but prioritizes those whose children are enrolled in school, and many parents said they did not qualify for aid.
Bruno Maes, who recently left as head of UNICEF in Haiti, acknowledged that there was not enough funding to help all families, but said that more children would drop out of school without assistance.
The education situation was complicated by the more than 100,000 students, primarily from the capital, who moved to the south, where life is relatively calm.
But schools had no seats for them. Many students fled with only the clothing on their backs and showed up without birth certificates, school transcripts or any other documentation proving what grade they were in.
“You have a lack of documents, you have the impact of the violence obliging them to flee, and then you have no seat in schools, and then you have no money and cannot pay,” Mr. Maes said. “The scope of the issues affecting the majority of children is huge.”
The stakes are high: UNICEF said the number of children recruited by gangs last year increased by 70 percent. It is common to see 7-year-olds working as gang lookouts, experts say.
Janine Morna, who researches children in armed conflict for Amnesty International, said young gang members in Haiti whom she had interviewed for an upcoming report told her they had joined either under threat or out of financial desperation. The gangs often provide either a small monthly payment or allow younger members to keep the change after running errands, she said.
None of the minors she interviewed were in school.
“We know schools can prevent recruitment by keeping children active and engaged,” Ms. Morna said. “Children we spoke to were left idle — sometimes they were confined to their homes or displacement sites without the opportunity for enrichment and play.”
“The prospect of joining a gang,” she added, “becomes more attractive the longer you are out of school.”
Haitian officials said they were committed to improving the education system as a key step in stabilizing the country. The goal is to make schools more affordable by ensuring that early grades are free and providing families with stipends and books.
The government also rented buildings to accommodate students whose schools had become de facto shelters.
“Haiti has invested a lot in education,” said the country’s education minister, Augustin Antoine.
Some schools in the West Department, which includes Port-au-Prince, reopened in the fall, but with fewer students, said Etienne Louisseul France, the Education Ministry official who oversees schools in that region.
Haiti has been in turmoil since 2021, when its last elected president was assassinated. Last year, gangs banded together in coordinated attacks on police stations, hospitals and entire neighborhoods. With its police department depleted — many officers took advantage of U.S. humanitarian parole visas — the government has struggled to contain the violence.
The Port-au-Prince airport has been closed since November after gang members shot at U.S. commercial aircraft. An international force, financed by the Biden administration and made up mostly of Kenyan police officers, has done little to loosen the gangs’ grip on the capital.
The U.N. said at least 5,600 people were killed in 2024, up nearly 25 percent from the year before.
“Now the situation is that many schools had to shut down, even private schools,” Mr. France said, adding that officials have to “think of a Plan B.”
Ms. Elpenord’s backup plan is to eventually send her son to live with family away from their neighborhood so he can attend school. Her daughter tried going back to school a few weeks ago, but gang skirmishes kept her out.
“I feel this is destroying me,” said her son, Wudley, who is still hoping to start 10th grade. “And it makes me sad.”
André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
