The last time Faida Pierre, 10, went to school, her mother was stranded on the roof of the school building, barefoot and crying, as a gang attacked the Port-au-Prince neighborhood around her.
The principal and teachers urged parents to pick up their children as gunfire grew louder and gunmen approached. Then everyone lost their lives. FAIDA was left alone.
“There was a panic,” Faida recalled, “and people were running from the building. People were saying that robbers had attacked the neighborhood, so the children were trying to reach the roof.”
That was a year ago, and Fuida, Fauda, who was in the third grade, stopped going to school.
With their education and 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 flee.
Many schools are closed because they are in the occupied territories of the network. Others have become de facto shelters, as have more than a million people, about 10 percent of the country's population — who fled their homes when their communities were raided.
Following the escalation of violence in Port-au-Prince, last February, UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Advocate Organization and the protection of schools, fell to around 15,000 households not to go to school.
Families whose schools remained open also said they could not register their children because they did not have enough money for school fees, clothing and materials. Most children in Haiti attend private schools, but public schools also charge modest fees that many families who burned their homes and businesses to the ground can no longer afford.
At the same time, tens of thousands of children, in overcrowded schools in several communities, left Port-au-Prince for safer places elsewhere in Haiti.
Schools also had to cope with the number of teachers and staff, many of whom were killed or left the country. Haiti's schools have lost a quarter of their teachers, according to government officials.
In addition to the loss of education, being out of school makes them vulnerable to joining the very armed groups that have decimated their lives. Experts appreciate it up to half of the gang members are minors.
Port-au-Prince showed 77,000 ninth-graders at the end of the 2023-24 school year, up 10,000 from the previous year. As a result, officials estimated that there were 130,000 students in the school system's last academic year of 130,000 students in the capital region.
Officials said they could not fully estimate how many students dropped out this year.
Faida cannot go to school, but lives in one. Fuida's father was killed in a mob attack, her mother said, as she and Faida joined 5,000 people at the Lycée Marie Jeanne school, where Faida, a Port-au-Prince, joined.
When a New York Times reporter and photographer visited the school in the fall, Faida and her mother Farari were sleeping outdoors in a yard covered in mosquitoes and rainwater.
“At night, sometimes he wakes up and cries,” Ms Parice said. “He's asking if he's going back to school.”
Woodley Beageuge, 17, and his sister, Sadora Damus, 15, were also there and had been skipping school for more than a year.
Sadora dreams of becoming a police chief, but to enter the police academy, he must pass the ninth grade exams and drop out of school after the eighth grade. Wadley, who missed 10th grade, wants to be an auto mechanic.
One of many people sleeps on a classroom floor.
“My first priority would be to go back to school, because when I share my arms with the people I live with, 'if you want to be a mechanic, you have to go back to school,'” Waddley said. “My family can't afford to send a mechanic to school.”
The mother, Soirilia Elpenord, 38, wants her children at school, but the cosmetics shop and the gang at home with the landlord, the dubeler's mother, said it was higher than finding shelter.
“School? It's not a priority,” he said. “My priority is to live. The main priority for all parents in Haiti is how to live at this moment.”
UNICEF said the Haitian government has prioritized providing cash assistance to families in need, but whose children are enrolled in school and many parents do not qualify for aid.
Bruno Maes, who recently became head of UNICEF in Haiti, acknowledged that there is not enough funding to help all families, but said more children would drop out of school without help.
The educational situation was complicated with more than 100,000 students, primarily moving to the south, rather than moving to the south where life was relatively quieter.
However, there were no seats for them in the schools. Many students ran with only the clothes on their backs and showed birth certificates, school transcripts or any other documents proving what grade they were in.
“There is a lack of documents, violence forces them to flee, and then we have sit-ins in schools, and then you don't have money and you can't pay,” he said. Maes. “The range of issues that affect most children is huge.”
The stakes are high: UNICEF says the number of children confirmed by gangs last year increased by 70 percent. Experts say it's common to see kids as young as 7 doing things like web searches.
Janine Morna, who researches children in armed conflict for Amnesty International, said young gang members in Haiti, whom she met for an upcoming report, participate either under threat or out of financial desperation. Networks often pay a small monthly fee, or allow young members to maintain a shift in assignments after work.
None of the juveniles interviewed had attended school.
“We know that schools can prevent recruitment by keeping children active and engaged,” Ms Morna said. “What we talked about was empty, sometimes they were confined to their homes or relocation sites without access to enrichment and play.”
“The prospect of joining a gang,” he said, “is more attractive for a longer period of time than in school.”
Haitian authorities have said they are doing what they can to improve the education system as a key step in stabilizing the country. The goal is to make schools more affordable by providing families with free early grades and stipends and books.
The government also leased buildings to house students, with the schools becoming de facto shelters.
“Haiti has been sleeping a lot in education,” said Augustin Antoine, the country's education minister.
Some schools in the Western department, which is Port-au-Prince, reopened in the fall, but with fewer students, Etienne Louisseul France, the official of the Ministry of Education, which oversees schools in this region.
Haiti has been in turmoil since 2021, when the last elected president was assassinated. Last year, gangs came together in coordinated attacks on police stations, hospitals and entire neighborhoods. Depleted by the police department — many officers took advantage of US humanitarian conditional visas — the government struggled to contain the violence.
Port-au-Prince airport has hit US commercial jets since November of network members. An international force funded by the Biden administration and largely trained by Kenyan police officers has done little to loosen the gangs' grip on the capital.
At least the UN said so 5,600 people Killed in 2024, up nearly 25 percent from a year ago.
“The situation now is that many schools have to be closed, even private schools,” he said.
Mrs. Elpenord's backup plan is to eventually send her son to live with her family to remove them from their neighborhood. Her daughter tried to go back to school a few weeks ago, but the gang shooting kept her out.
“I feel like it's destroying me,” she said. “And that makes me sad.”
André Paulte Contributed from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.