More than 1,800 public schools in southern Iraq and Iran’s Khuzestan province reopened to returning displaced families on Monday, the first coordinated restart of classroom instruction in the cross-border war zone since fighting halted three weeks ago, but provincial officials and aid workers cautioned that overcrowded rooms, missing teachers and untreated trauma were already overwhelming the rollout.

Iraqi Education Ministry data published Tuesday in Baghdad showed that 1,143 schools across Basra, Maysan and Dhi Qar governorates had reopened in some form, alongside roughly 690 facilities in Khuzestan and parts of Bushehr province confirmed by Iran’s provincial education directorates. Of those, officials acknowledged, at least 380 were operating out of partially damaged buildings, tents or borrowed mosque halls.

“The instruction has resumed, but it has resumed under conditions no education system was designed to handle,” said Reem al-Bayati, a senior adviser at UNICEF’s regional office in Amman, in a Tuesday briefing. “We are seeing class sizes of 65 and 70 children in rooms built for 30. We are seeing teachers who themselves were displaced and have not been paid since February. And we are seeing children who, frankly, are not yet able to learn.”

The reopening had been pushed forward by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s office, which announced last week that public schools across the southern governorates would resume classes on May 4 as part of a broader normalization push tied to refugee returns. Iran’s Education Ministry followed with its own directive on Saturday covering Khuzestan, where roughly 340,000 displaced residents have re-registered with provincial authorities since the April 15 ceasefire took effect, according to figures published by Tehran’s State Welfare Organization.

In Basra, where the school year had been suspended on March 4 after Iranian missile fragments and Israeli strikes on adjacent oil infrastructure prompted a regional evacuation, education officials said roughly 71 percent of registered students returned to class on the first morning. That figure dropped sharply in outlying districts. In the Hartha and Abu al-Khasib subdistricts, where unexploded ordnance clearance teams remain active, attendance hovered near 40 percent, according to provincial education director Hassan al-Mansouri.

“We told families: if your neighborhood has been declared cleared, send your child. If not, we will come to you,” al-Mansouri said in an interview at the directorate’s offices. He said mobile teaching units, mostly two-teacher teams operating out of repurposed shipping containers, had been deployed to 28 villages where building inspections were still pending.

On the Iranian side, the picture was more uneven. Khuzestan’s provincial education director, Mahdi Rashidpour, told the state-run IRNA news agency that 88 percent of the province’s schools had been “operationally restored” but conceded that fewer than half had reliable electricity through the full school day. In Ahvaz, where the city’s main thermal station took repeated damage in late March, classes were running on half-day schedules to conserve generator fuel.

Aid groups said the more pressing problem was psychological. The International Rescue Committee and the Iraqi Red Crescent jointly screened roughly 4,200 children across reopened schools in Basra and Maysan during the first two days of class and flagged 38 percent as showing symptoms consistent with acute stress or post-traumatic responses — sleep disruption, withdrawal, hypervigilance to loud noises.

“What we found is what we expected to find, only worse,” said Dr. Karim Daoud, a child psychiatrist working with the Iraqi Red Crescent’s emergency mental health task force. “When a fighter jet flies over Basra now, even a civilian one, half the classroom freezes. The teachers freeze too. There is no plan in place at the ministry level for that. There needs to be.”

UNICEF said it had begun training roughly 1,400 teachers in basic psychosocial first aid through a fast-tracked program coordinated with Iraq’s Ministry of Education, but acknowledged the rollout would take months to reach scale. The agency also said it was working with Iran’s Education Ministry on a parallel program in Khuzestan, though access for international staff inside Iran remained limited and most of the work was being done remotely through Iranian counterpart organizations.

Teacher shortages have compounded the strain. The Iraqi teachers union estimated that roughly 18 percent of the southern governorates’ instructional workforce remained displaced or unaccounted for, with a smaller share — primarily older teachers and those with chronic health conditions — having indicated they did not intend to return to classrooms in the near term. In Khuzestan, provincial officials said they were seeking emergency contracts with recent university graduates and retired teachers to fill the gap.

Funding pressure has been acute. The Iraqi finance ministry has redirected roughly $140 million from a supplemental reconstruction allocation toward education infrastructure repair, but officials in Baghdad said the actual need was closer to four times that figure. Iran’s parliament has not yet passed a comparable supplemental.

International donors have begun to coalesce around the gap. At a follow-up meeting to last week’s Marseille reconstruction conference, working-level officials from the European Union, Japan, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the World Bank discussed a proposed $620 million education-and-child-protection facility that would channel funds through UNICEF and the World Food Programme rather than directly to either national government — a structure designed to satisfy donor concerns about disbursement controls in Iran.

“There is consensus that you cannot rebuild a region without rebuilding its schools, and you cannot rebuild its schools without putting the money somewhere people will accept,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the International Crisis Group. “What is not yet settled is how fast that money actually moves. The children are already in the rooms.”

In Ahvaz, a 36-year-old returning mother of three, Soraya Mostafavi, said she had brought her two older children back to a primary school whose west wing was sealed off behind plywood after a March shockwave blew out its windows. “They sit on the floor in the hallway some days because the classroom is full,” she said. “But they sit. They are with their friends again. For now, that is enough.”

Iraqi and Iranian officials said joint assessment teams from UNICEF and the World Food Programme would visit four governorates and three Khuzestan districts later this week and that an initial cross-border progress report on the school reopenings would be published before the end of May.