Early on Monday morning, just one week before this year's official school year opening, the parking lot of a new private school in the residential area of Straulesti-Baneasa in Northern Bucharest is packed with expensive cars, mostly SUVs.

Rich parents accompany the 60 first students to the official school opening, and together with teachers and media, make about 250 people. Among them, Romanian businessmen, top private investors, as well as several expats.

After a brief opening ceremony, the principal of the school calls the roll, but only by first names. Many of the parents currently paying EUR 550 a month for their children’s tuition like their privacy, especially when the media is present.

The school, called Aletheea, is an investment of EUR 2.5 million from Romanian business lawyer Mona Musat, managing partner to one of the largest local law firms – Musat & Asociatii. Her father, Gheorghe Musat, founder of Musat & Asociatii  law firm and one of the first business lawyers on the Romanian market in the early 90s, can also be spotted in the audience.

Mona Musat does not want it to be any kind of school: apart from the mandatory curricula required by the Romanian Education Ministry, a lot of extra-curricular courses and activities have been included in the educational program, all of which imply high operating and maintenance costs.

Activities include intensive German, English and French lessons, dedicated sports classes for football, basketball, fencing, aikido, tennis and street-dance, arts classes such as origami, design, animation, architecture, theater and acting, and music lessons for piano, guitar and violin.

The classrooms are modern, spacious and colorful, looking more like the creative work spaces at Google rather than the traditional classrooms in Romanian state schools.

Besides the 20 classrooms, the school also has special rooms for music and theatre lessons, an IT lab, and laboratories for history, physics, chemistry, geography, biology, and foreign languages, but also a special room for counseling. It also has a large sports hall, with a full size basketball court, outdoor football and basketball courts as well as a cafeteria.

For investor Mona Musat, who has been with Musat & Asociatii law firm for the last 13 years, the school is not only an business: it is also the place where her own son, now a fifth grader, is now studying.

Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com

(Photo credit: Romania-insider.com)