CHINA:THE ROAD leading to China's most infamous school, the Juyuan Middle School where hundreds of students perished in the May 12th earthquake, is blocked by police.
People's Liberation Army soldiers are cleaning the site, but there is a risk of infection, so no journalists, volunteers or local villagers are allowed in to the site, explained one police officer guarding access to the school.
There is another reason why the road to Juyuan Middle School, and dozens of other schools around the quake zone, has been closed.
Anguished parents demonstrated in Dujiangyan, a small city 50km (30 miles) from the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu, this week against officials they hold responsible for shoddy building that caused the school to collapse like a house of cards. They were taken away by riot police.
Despite remarkable openness and tolerance of foreign reporters since the quake, public displays of dissent are not tolerated in China, even by grieving parents.
The earthquake has so far claimed almost 70,000 lives, with thousands more missing and five million left homeless. Some 9,000 children were killed in the quake, many of them at school as the tremor struck, and parents blame flimsy schools and poor building standards for the deaths.
Juyuan Middle School was a scene of sheer horror after the earthquake, the bodies of teenagers being brought out from the rubble with appalling regularity, each identification marked with a round of firecrackers.
The nearby apartment buildings are all still standing in sharp contrast to the pile of rubble that is the school building. This is a scene repeated around the province, and one of the reasons why parents are so angry.
It is still not clear how many children died at Juyuan Middle School. The official death toll is 278, but parents insist more than 400 died. Some locals said soldiers were still digging children out of the wreckage up to a day or two ago.
Many bloodlines ended with the quake - the One Child Policy means many parents lost their only children in the disaster, and because they are too old to have more children, there can be no more offspring.
An initial openness about reporting in the disaster area has been replaced with restrictions. A special journalist pass is needed now where none was before, and the June passes are not ready, or will not be issued until later. Various reasons are given for why the restrictions have been imposed.
The government has conceded that schools were badly built. The Southern Weekend newspaper referred to "tofu construction" used in building the schools and quoted Chen Baosheng, a ministry of construction disaster relief team member and professor at Tong Ji University saying:
"The death of so many children ought to make our urban planning officials, our architects, and our structural engineers all reflect deeply.
"Juyuan Middle School's location, architectural structure, construction process, and construction materials all had problems," said Mr Chen.
Xinhua news agency reported that disaster relief HQ in Sichuan had set up a working group to help parents of students killed in the quake and admitted that "some bereaved parents questioned the quality of the school buildings' construction and asked authorities to intervene." It did not report on the the demonstrations. China's cabinet, the state council, said all school buildings in the quake zone would be appraised.
In the streets of Dujiangyan, people are aware that the school has become the most infamous in China but they are more reluctant than before to discuss the school's plight. Locals have reportedly been told not to talk to foreign journalists.
"This was my school, this was my mother's school. We're not experts on the building, how should we know what happened. Many factors caused the school to collapse," said one man selling mobile phones from a stand near the school.
"I know what you want to ask," said a bicycle seller, lying on a mattress outside his house, which has alarming large cracks in the wall.
"My house is okay, but I moved the bikes out here to sell them. Things are quiet now. Our lives are getting back to normal," he said.