On 24 June the government decided that teachers left without a school when their institution is merged or closed will be bused, at the state’s expense, to their new workplace. The measure itself — extending to staff the school transport that until now only pupils enjoyed — looks technical. But for a district like Ungheni, where the school map has been shrinking for two decades and where a gymnasium has just been shut down, it touches a real nerve: how do you keep teachers in the system when schools vanish beneath them?
What the government approved
According to the government’s statement, the school transport mechanism — which until now applied to pupils studying in another locality — is being extended to the management, teaching staff and auxiliary teaching staff of reorganized primary, gymnasium and lyceum schools, so they can reach their new workplace. The stated goal is to “support the mobility of education staff and keep qualified teachers in the system.” Under the same decision, pupils with disabilities will receive transport regardless of the distance to school, according to individual needs.
The Minister of Education and Research, Dan Perciun, put the measure in figures — at the national level.
This year, 57 buses from the state budget are going to our schools, so that we can additionally provide transport for over 1,000 pupils starting in September. Dan Perciun, Minister of Education and Research
Why teachers are moving
Transport for staff did not appear out of nowhere: it accompanies the reorganization of the school network launched nationally. According to the state agency Moldpres, which reported the publication in the Official Gazette of the amendments to the Education Code, the state is targeting dozens of small schools, most of them shifting to a different format, with the reorganization affecting more than 2,700 pupils, of whom over 1,300 are to be bused. For those transferred, the law provides free transport and a 1,000-lei monthly allowance for two years; for affected staff — priority re-employment within the district, with transport covered, or relocation with a one-off allowance of up to 300,000 lei. Most provisions take effect, with some exceptions, from 2027.
The logic is simple: when a small school closes or merges with another, the children and teachers have to be taken somewhere. The question for the district’s residents is how far that “somewhere” is here.
How it looks in Ungheni district
National Bureau of Statistics data show a network in steady contraction. From 65 primary and general secondary education institutions in the 2003/04 school year, Ungheni district has reached 46 in 2024/25. Over the same period the number of pupils fell by almost half — from 20,121 to 11,171. In other words, in two decades the district has lost 19 of its 65 schools and almost half the children who once filled their desks.
The reorganization already has a concrete face. In February 2026, the Valea Mare communal council voted to transfer the building of the Buzduganii de Sus gymnasium to the town hall “due to the liquidation of the education institution,” as written in the decision published in the State Register of Local Acts. The request had come from another school in the commune, the “Andrei Chivriga” gymnasium — a sign that the remaining pupils were absorbed by the nearby network.
The need for transport in that corner of the district is not new. Back in August 2024, when the district was receiving a batch of school buses, a representative of the Ungheni Education Department, Tatiana Lazăr, noted in a Radio Free Europe report that “over 50 children from Buzduganii de Sus want to attend the «Alexandr Pușkin» high school in Ungheni, and transport is urgently needed here.” It was, in effect, the early announcement of a move that became official two years later.
A shortage no bus can fill
This is also the limit of the measure. Transport is about mobility — how a teacher gets from one school to another — not about the heart of the problem. And the heart of it, in Ungheni, is the staff shortage: the district enters the new school year with 73 vacant teaching posts, the fifth-largest shortage in the country. No bus produces a maths or physics teacher where there isn’t one.
How many of the district’s staff will actually use the new transport is not yet known — the decision was taken only on 24 June. And the number of school buses and routes serving Ungheni district is not public: Triunghi.md did not find it on the Ungheni Education Department’s website, on the district council’s page, or in the local acts. The district appears only as a recipient of a batch of school buses distributed to districts in August 2024.
The other side
For pupils, free transport has existed for several years and is financed from the state budget — through reimbursing transport operators — for children who study in a locality other than their place of residence. The 24 June statement, however, does not publicly specify which budget covers the transport of teaching staff — a question that matters for small town halls already short of money.
The reorganization of the school network also has its critics. In the debate in Chișinău, critics of the reform warned that closing small schools accelerates the depopulation of villages: without a school, a rural community loses one of the last reasons young families stay. The government’s argument is on the other side — that a school with a handful of children can offer neither qualified teachers nor proper conditions, and that merging, with transport guaranteed, gives those same children a better chance. Between these two truths, year after year, ever fewer desks remain occupied in the district’s schools.