European road to knowledge leaves children stuck in mud
Children living far from their schools are not always able to reach classes safely even by school bus, as vehicles get stuck in the mud on sections “forgotten” during the construction of the so-called European road to knowledge.
After the rains of 14 September, the Lazo – Alava – Marianca de Jos – Ștefan Vodă road turned into a clay swamp. Local residents have been publishing videos of the mud-covered route and demanding urgent intervention from the authorities.
According to Valeria Ceban, who was the first to post footage on social media, the situation has gone beyond all limits.
“The Lazo – Alava – Marianca de Jos – Ștefan Vodă road was left today, after the rain, in a simply unacceptable condition. It is solid sludge, cars are sliding, and traffic is becoming very dangerous.”
The most alarming part, she said, concerns school buses.
“The worst thing is that the school buses transporting children could not pass normally today. They were sliding on this road,” she wrote.
Ceban appealed directly to those responsible.
“Gentlemen in charge, are you waiting for a tragedy before you intervene? Does it have to reach the point where a bus full of children skids and someone is injured before the problem of this road is taken seriously?”
According to her, the problem is not new: the road becomes impassable every time it rains.
“We are talking about the safety of our children. After every rain, we parents sit anxiously wondering whether our children will get to school and back home. And let us not forget that this is only the beginning of autumn. What will happen in winter?”
Local residents ask why children were left with unsafe roads
Comments under the post were no less blunt. Residents accused the authorities of closing schools without thinking about how children would then reach the institutions that remained open.
“They know how to close a school, but how the children will get there does not interest them,” one user wrote.
Olga Lucian, chair of the Ștefan Vodă District Council, admitted in a comment to Jurnal TV that the road is not managed by the district authorities, but insisted that “work is being carried out”.
“This is a regional road, where intervention has already taken place to do some profiling work and improve it somehow. But at the same time, when weather conditions worsen, we considered an alternative route through the village of Feștelița, where there is asphalt, until conditions improve. I also appealed to the Ministry of Infrastructure to prioritise this particular section of road,” Lucian said.
According to her, pupils did reach school that day. However, while major repairs, which require significant financial resources, have not yet begun, the authorities are trying to improve the road gradually, including by adding gravel.
This year, more than 40 million lei was allocated from the Road Fund and the National Fund for Regional Development for road repairs in this sector. Yet new asphalt on separate stretches does not solve the problem of safely transporting children from small villages.
After rain, a school bus can travel without difficulty along asphalt or gravel, but then inevitably reaches dirt crossings and “forgotten” stretches that turn the entire route into a risk.
A European road without a road
Local residents are asking a simple question: why spend tens of millions of lei on separate sections of a single school route if one unrepaired kilometre in the middle still blocks traffic and makes the road unsafe?
Road workers explain this through the specifics of financing, tender procedures, the priority given to eliminating the most dangerous sections and the principle of social fairness: every village, from time to time, should have at least one or two kilometres of road repaired. But the main problem remains a lack of money.
Who, however, said that the road to the European Union necessarily includes an actual road? The authorities promised a European course, and that is the course the country is following. Asphalt, safe school buses and a decent life were apparently not included in the package of promises.
The European road to knowledge has therefore become a bitter metaphor. Children are expected to travel to school along routes that fail after every rainfall, while parents are left wondering whether a journey for lessons will end safely. In a country constantly told to look towards Europe, even the road to class can still disappear into mud.
