The Ministry of National Education informs that, in order to include children aged between 3 and 6 years in preschool education, the following steps will take place, successively, at the level of each educational unit:

• re-registration of children who attend kindergarten this school year and wish to attend it in the 2018-2019 school year - will begin on May 7;
• registration of new children will be carried out from May 21.

The schedule for re-registrations and registrations will be set by the management of the educational unit and will be posted, in a visible place, in each kindergarten, for the information of parents and interested public, including on its website (if it exists), and possibly on the websites of the school inspectorates.

Filling of available spots, after the re-registration process is completed, will generally take place in descending order of age groups, as follows: big group (5-year-old children), middle group (4-year-old children), and small group (3-year-old children). According to Government Decision no. 1.252/2012 and within the limit of available spots, children aged between 2 and 3 years can also be enrolled in the small group.

If, in an educational unit, the number of registration applications is higher than the number of available spots, general selection criteria and specific selection criteria will be successively applied.

The general selection criteria are the following:

• the existence of a document proving that a child is an orphan of both parents (the situation of the child coming from an orphanage/a placement center/family placement is considered the same as the situation of a child orphaned of both parents);
• the existence of a document proving that the child is an orphan of one parent;
• the existence of a brother/sister enrolled in the respective educational unit;
• the existence of a medical certificate attesting the child's degree of disability.

The specific selection criteria (developed by each preschool educational unit, approved by its Board of Administration and endorsed by the County School Inspectorate/the Bucharest Municipality’s School Inspectorate until May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-registration lists. Also, specific selection criteria will only be applied after exhausting the general criteria.

To ensure the transparency of the re-registration/registration process, the managements of preschool educational units will visibly display, for all interested parties, the following information:

• the institution’s capacity (the number of children for which it was designed);
• the number of spots approved by the schooling plan for the 2018-2019 school year (by age groups: small, middle, large);
• general and specific criteria for registering children;
• the number of children re-registered/registered daily (during the established period) out of the total available.

We mention that private preschool educational units also have the obligation to display in a visible place the information regarding their status, namely whether they are authorized to function provisionally or are accredited by the Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-university Education (ARACIP).