When the monsoon finally loosened its grip, the children of Baiji Katcha returned along a path bleached gray by silt. Where their school once stood — two rooms and a verandah painted the colour of a mango peel — there was only a rectangle of cracked mud and the remnant of a swing set jutting like a rib from the ground. The headmistress, Madam Zahida, carried the school register in a plastic bag and set it on a brick. “We will hold class here,” she told the students. “Until the building comes back, learning must not stop,” she added.

That promise has been repeated across Pakistan for three decades, spoken after the flash floods of the 1990s, after the catastrophic 2010 inundation and again after the unprecedented 2022 monsoon. And the country is facing a huge deluge again in 2025, and school buildings are again being swept away across Pakistan. The scale has been staggering. According to international assessments, the 2010 floods damaged or destroyed thousands of schools across the country. Twelve years later, the 2022 deluge submerged entire districts, leaving over 20,000 schools damaged or destroyed. Some counts put the figure closer to 27,000 institutions, disrupting education for millions of children.

“The school was our shelter in every storm, but when the walls fell, it felt like we lost our second home,” recalled Arif, a teacher in Sialkot who held classes under a peepal tree for two years after a flash flood hollowed out the foundations of his school.

Floods rarely discriminate, yet the burden falls hardest on children. Girls are often the first to drop out when families are displaced or when temporary classrooms prove unsafe. “My daughter stopped going,” said Fatima, a mother in Khairpur, Sindh. “The boys could walk to another school, but for her it was not safe. She still asks me when her own school will come back.”

Tent schools, often erected by donors, bring temporary relief. But they are far from ideal. In winter, the canvas sweats in the morning and freezes by noon; in summer, it is an oven. “We are grateful for the tents, but no child should grow up thinking education belongs under a sheet of plastic,” said a local NGO worker in Dera Ghazi Khan.

The institutional reasons behind stalled reconstruction are well-known. Budgets crawl through approval stages, land disputes linger, and responsibilities split between education, works and services, and disaster management authorities. The result: promises without buildings, years without classrooms.

Still, some areas have shown what resilience looks like. In Swat, schools rebuilt after cloudbursts were elevated on raised plinths, with stronger walls and proper drainage. In Dera Ghazi Khan, rain gardens were introduced to divert hill torrents away from classrooms. These modest engineering choices — higher floors, tied-down roofs, washable finishes — proved their worth when the next flood came.

“The irony is that building back safer is not expensive,” noted a civil engineer involved in post-flood recovery. “It is cheaper than rebuilding again and again.”

But the silence of missing schools continues to accumulate. A UNICEF official warned in 2022 that Pakistan faced not only an infrastructure crisis but a learning emergency, with millions of children’s education suspended indefinitely. “When a school collapses, it is not just walls that fall — it is the future of a whole generation that cracks,” he said.

Communities, tired of waiting, improvise. In rural Sindh, bamboo frames with tin roofs shelter makeshift classes. In Balochistan, volunteers clear debris from mud-plastered rooms so children can sit on salvaged mats. These solutions are fragile, but they keep hope alive.

For Zahida, the headmistress in Baiji Katcha, the day the new building finally rose was bittersweet. It stood three steps higher than the last, with latched windows and a small store for books. The children cheered as ribbons were cut, but Zahida’s eyes wandered to the waterline stained on a tamarind trunk at the edge of the compound — a reminder of where the river had stood. “We cannot forget the flood,” she said quietly. “If we forget, it will return to teach us again.”