The aim of this article is to take a closer look at school communities in the Polish‑Ukrainian borderland in the 1918/1919 school year. Their members, particularly the headteachers, previously focused on teaching the students obedience and loyalty towards the emperor in Vienna, had to completely redefine their roles in order to find themselves in the new reality in the late autumn of 1918. Moreover, another year of the turmoil of war, countless teachers and students in the army, enormous economic problems, exacerbated by the fights for dominance on the disputed territory, forced the headteachers to deal with matters as they arose, and the decisions they made did not always work in practice. What cast a shadow over secondary school activity apart from the Polish‑Ukrainian war was also Polish‑Jewish relations.