The kitchen where meals are cooked every day for the children of the „Poienița” kindergarten in the town of Cornești now looks different. The town hall announced on Thursday, 3 July, that renovation of the institution’s food block is complete — a space the authority describes as „important for ensuring modern and safe conditions for preparing food.”
The photos published by the town hall show a fully rebuilt room: walls lined with light-coloured tiles, an industrial extractor hood with a metal duct descending from the ceiling above the stove, a large four-burner stove, new kitchen furniture, sinks and doors with double-glazed panels. In technical terms, the „food block” is the kitchen itself — the room where staff prepare the little ones’ meals every day.
Why a kindergarten kitchen matters
In a preschool, the food block is not a decorative detail. This is where the breakfast, lunch and snacks the children eat every day are prepared, and the space must comply with the sanitary rules for children’s collective-catering units: easy-to-clean surfaces, ventilation that removes steam and odours, separation of preparation areas and access to water. The tiling, the professional hood and the sinks visible in the images are exactly the features these rules require — which is why renovating a kindergarten kitchen translates, in practice, into the safety of the meals served to the youngest.
„Poienița” is the kindergarten of the town of Cornești, one of two preschools in the area alongside the „Garofița” crèche-kindergarten in the neighbouring village of Cornești. Cornești holds town status and lies on the railway between Chișinău and Ungheni — the district’s second urban locality after the municipality of Ungheni.
How much it cost and who paid — questions still unanswered
The town hall’s announcement stops at the photos and the message that „investment in preschool education is an investment in the health and future of children.” But it lacks the figures that would tell the full story: how much the work cost, who carried it out and from what source it was paid — the local budget, a state transfer or an externally funded project.
A check in the State Register of Local Acts shows that in 2026 the Cornești town council amended its budget several times and redistributed funds, including through orders in June. None of these public decisions, however, explicitly names the „Poienița” food-block renovation, so the exact cost of the work remains, for now, undisclosed.
When it comes to public money spent in a public institution, these figures — the contract value, the contractor and the funding source — are part of the transparency a town hall owes its citizens; they appear neither in the announcement nor in the acts published so far by the town council.