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The Rákóczi Association will transport more than 500 Hungarian students from scattered settlements in Transylvania to Hungarian schools in the new school year, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) said.
According to the press release, the joint program of the Rákóczi Association and the School Foundation will help 556 Hungarian students in Romania to receive mother tongue education in the new school year 2024-2025. The buses, that will seat 8 to 21 people, will transport students of different ages to schools in 13 counties.
The Rákóczi Association extended its school bus program to Transylvania last year, and runs it in partnership with the Cluj-based School Foundation, with financial support from the Hungarian government. As reported by Hungary Today, 42 new buses were handed over to the Rákóczi Association last year to help children in Transylvania to attend Hungarian schools. The Hungarian government has supported the purchase of the minibuses with HUF 500 million (EUR 1.6 million), to which the Rákóczi Association has contributed HUF 150 million (EUR 400,000) from its own resources.
The aim of the program is to bring students from the Transylvanian scattered settlements to Hungarian-language schools, giving them the opportunity to study in their mother tongue.
Without transport, it would be burdensome or impractical for parents to commute to a Hungarian-language school further away from their homes, and they would opt for a Romanian-language school closer to home,” the communication said.
The school bus program operates in 12 counties of the Transylvanian, Partium and Banat regions, and in the region of Csángó Land, i.e. the Moldavian Bacău (Bákó) county.
Under the program, a total of 40 buses will shuttle 556 children to 36 educational institutions in 33 dispersed settlements from September. Getting to school is the zero step of mother tongue education, thus we pay special attention to the implementation of the bus program,”
the press release quoted Zoltán Levente Nagy, president of the School Foundation, as saying, thanking the Rákóczi Association and the Hungarian government for their support.
The school buses collect Hungarian students from several villages in most of the Transylvanian scattered counties, even dozens of them, and take them to schools with Hungarian sections in towns and village centers. In Maros (Mures) and Szilágy (Salaj) counties, children are taken from one village to a nearby Hungarian school. In Csángó Land, school buses will transport a total of 31 children within the municipality of Lábnyik (Vladnic), the press release said.
Via MTI, Featured image: Hungary Today