Students from “Gheorghe Asachi” Refuse to Attend a “Moldovan”-French Lyceum

Nearly 300 students of the secondary-school grades of the „Gheorghe Asachi” lyceum from Chisinau protested on Thursday, May 4, against the change of the lyceum’s entitling from „Romanian-French” in „Moldovan-French”, operated on Wednesday by the board of the institution. The protest of the secondary-school students has began by breaking the glass plate with the inscription “Moldovan” from the institution’s frontispiece and changing it with a paper where the inscription “Romanian” was handwritten. The pupils cried out slogans like “We are Romanians and we are at home! ”, “Asachi !” etc. The head of the ad-hoc strike committee, the 12th grade Nadejda Trofim, declared for Info-Prim Neo that the pupils from the “Gh.Asachi” lyceum are extremely revolted of the institution’s board decision to change the entitling of the lyceum and infringing in this way the national identity of the pupils. According to the same source, the demonstration started spontaneously and the pupils decided to abandon the lessons in order to protest against the unilateral decision of the lyceum’s board. According to Nadejda Trofim, the pupils are going to fight till the end for rehabilitating the historical name of the Lyceum. The principle of the “Gh.Asachi” Lyceum, Boris Volosatai, demanded the students to behave civilized and accepted to discuss litigations with an initiative group. He explained the operated change by the fact that the official title of the school, according to a Governmental decision from 1990, is Theoretical Moldovan-French lyceum Gheorghe Asachi. Also, he asked the pupils not to respond to provocations and to choose a civilized method – to address a petition to the leadership of the country with the request to change the Governmental decision from 1990 and to entitle the lyceum “Romanian-French”. More than 6 thousand pupils graduated the “Gh.Asachi” lyceum, of which 200 became habilitated doctors, 400 doctors of science, political and cultural personalities as the founders of the Mathematics school of the Republic of Moldova, Sibirski brothers, the actor Valeriu Cupcea, the writer Agnesa Rosca, the late Doina Aldea-Teodorovici, the politicians Iurie Rosca and Dumitru Braghis.