The “Raisa Cojocaru” Art School in Ungheni held its 2026 graduation this week. At a ceremony that gathered pupils, teachers and parents, the class numbered 80 graduates, according to Ungheni City Hall — 74 from the fourth-year classes and 6 from the fifth year. (The school had initially announced 74 graduates, those who completed the four core years.) These are 80 children and teenagers who, after hours of drawing, painting, composition and sculpture, close one chapter and open another.
A school named after a person
Few schools bear the name of someone who kept them alive. This is one of them. Raisa Cojocaru was, for almost four decades (City Hall gives her term as 1980 to 2018), the director of the painting school in Ungheni — the soul of the institution that the municipality decided, in 2020, to dedicate to her. The Municipal Council’s decision came after 340 residents of Ungheni signed for the school to bear her name — an initiative that started not with the administration, but with the guild of artists.
Raisa Cojocaru was the wife of painter Ilie Cojocaru, a native of Ungheni, himself a teacher at the same school and still at the easel at 76. At a 2019 exhibition dedicated to her memory, the artist Victor Cobzac was then collecting signatures precisely to propose Raisa’s name to the City Hall — a community’s gesture of gratitude to a person who, colleagues said, “invested in an idea”.
An institution over half a century old
The school has operated, by its own account, since 1968 — a tradition of over 57 years, as the City Hall also calls it — training children over four years, in sections of drawing, painting, fine and decorative composition, sculpture and art history, with techniques ranging from the study of form to stained glass and batik. It shares its address — 9 Nicolae Bălcescu Street — with the Palace of Culture, at the heart of the town’s cultural life. Together with the Music School, it forms the backbone of artistic education for the municipality’s children.
Over the decades, names that went on to careers in fine art came out of its classrooms. Among the predecessors of this year’s graduates, the City Hall names Dumitru Verdianu, Ion Zderciuc, Victor Cobzac, Ilie Cojocaru, Valeriu Curtu, Victor Crudu and Alexandru Plăcintă. And at this year’s ceremony, as in previous years, the best students received excellence scholarships offered by the school’s partners.
Young people trained at home, in a district that is losing them
The real stakes of a simple graduation ceremony become visible only against this backdrop. The Ungheni district is losing its young people at a dizzying pace: the number of those aged 15–29 fell from 24,013 in 2014 to 11,029 in 2026 — more than half, gone in twelve years, according to the National Bureau of Statistics’ provisional data. If in 2014 young people were almost a quarter of the district’s population, they are now under a sixth.
Against this backdrop, a school that, year after year, turns out dozens of children who know how to draw, to compose, to see the world differently, is not a footnote on the cultural agenda. It is one of the few local factories of reasons why a young person might, one day, stay — or come back.
The number of graduates and the details of the ceremony come from the official communication of the school and of Ungheni City Hall. The data on Raisa Cojocaru and the renaming of the institution are confirmed from press reports and the City Hall’s statement; Raisa Cojocaru’s years of life do not appear in the public sources consulted. The founding year (1968) is given by the school’s sources. The demographic figures are official data from the National Bureau of Statistics for the Ungheni district (2026 — provisional data).
Update, 17 June 2026: the class figure was completed with official data from Ungheni City Hall — 80 graduates (74 from the fourth-year classes and 6 from the fifth year); initially, the school had reported 74, that is, the graduates of the four core years. The «over 57 years» tradition, the list of alumni who became known names and the excellence scholarships also come from the City Hall’s statement.