The president of Ungheni district, Dionisie Ternovschi, published on Tuesday, 21 July, a video filmed in the yard of the «Elada» Theoretical High School in Măcărești, alongside the head of the school and the head of the Ungheni Education Directorate, Violeta Gavriliuc. His message: the District Council traditionally allocates money for the current repairs of schools, and the building in Măcărești, put up with Greek help, deserves to be maintained. The approval, he specifies in the video, belongs to the district councillors.
The decisions published in the State Register of Local Acts put figures on that statement. And the figures are larger than a single job.
505,500 lei in one year, for heating alone
Last year, the school in Măcărești received money for its heating system on three separate occasions.
In March 2025, decision 2/11 allocated it 265,500 lei to replace the outdoor heating pipes. In August, decision 6/10 added 150,000 lei to replace 40 radiators — the work the video’s caption refers to. In November, decision 7/7 put in another 90,000 lei to rebuild the standalone heating system.
Added up, the allocations for heating at the school reached 505,500 lei in a single year.
The school was not a special case. At the same August sitting, the District Council approved larger sums for exactly the same type of work at two other schools: the „A. Groapă” gymnasium in Chirileni received 235,000 lei to replace its radiators, and the gymnasium in Bumbăta — 219,000 lei to replace radiators.
The wall and the canteen, in May 2026
The works the head of the school talks about in the video — a damaged wall of the building and part of the canteen’s sewerage — appear in decision 3/2 of 7 May 2026: 165,000 lei for repairing the wall and 36,300 lei for the canteen’s sewerage system.
Earlier, in October 2023, decision 7/23 had allocated 270,000 lei for repairing the building’s façade.
Added together, the allocations for the school building since 2023 reach 976,800 lei — almost a million, from a single source, the district component of the budget. In the four decisions of this kind in 2024, the school appears once, with 547,100 lei, but under staff costs, not works. That does not mean nothing was repaired in 2024: small repairs can also be paid from the school’s own budget, or by the city hall, and those sums are not published separately.
What is not public
The decisions show how much was allocated, but not who carried out the works, at what final price and with what guarantee. The contracts do not appear either in the public procurement search engine or on the school’s profile in the electronic system — one plausible explanation being the low-value threshold, below which the procedure is not published as a tender, but that remains a hypothesis, not an established fact. Neither is the sum actually spent out of the sum allocated made public; the decisions are distribution acts, not work acceptance reports.
Who actually built the school
The wording „built by the Greeks”, from the caption of the post, is correct but incomplete. According to the locality entry in the moldovenii.md encyclopaedia, the building was put up with a grant from Bartholomew I, Patriarch of Constantinople, the works being carried out by the Greek company «OECUMENICA» together with a local company. The cost is estimated at 1.4 million euros from the Greek side — and 3 million lei from the district administration. The central block was designed for the high-school level, with a capacity of 360 pupils, a figure that matches the number of places reported by the statistics up to 2022/23.
The school opened in 2007. The year appears in local sources, but not in any identifiable official act.
A school with 19 pupils in the high school grades
The investment in the building comes at a time when the school is emptying. National Bureau of Statistics data show, for the school in Măcărești, 327 pupils in the 2025/26 school year, against 353 a year earlier and 402 a decade ago. The building has 380 places.
The figure that says the most about the future of the high school level in the village is another one: 19 pupils in grades X and XI, at a school built for 360. At the 2025 Baccalaureate, the school entered 22 candidates, of whom 21 passed — a rate of 95.45% and an exam average of 6.95.
At district level, the trend is the same: 46 schools and 11,061 pupils in 2025/26, against 50 schools and 12,147 pupils ten years ago.
The proportion
Set against the district budget, the sums are small. Ungheni District Council executed expenditure of 476.4 million lei in 2025, of which 385.1 million on education. The 976,800 lei allocated to the building in Măcărești over four years amount to a quarter of one per cent of a single year’s spending on education — but they are exactly the kind of spending that keeps a village school open through the winter.
The big investments, on the other hand, go to the town. During the visit of the Minister of Education, Dan Perciun, to the district, the schools presented were the «Ion Creangă» High School, renovated with the support of the Government of Norway, the «Vasile Alecsandri» High School, with about 10 million lei from budget sources and the prospect of being turned into a model school, and the FabLab laboratory at the «Mihai Eminescu» High School — all in the municipality of Ungheni.
60,000 lei for the robotics team
The district council’s documents also yield another sum for the same school: decision 3/1 of 7 May 2026 allocates 60,000 lei from the district’s budget balance for the «Brain Power» robotics team to take part in the FTC European Championship in Istanbul on 26–28 June.