The Ministry of National Education informs that, in order to enroll in preschool education children aged between 3 and 6 years old, the following stages will take place successively at each educational institution:

• Re-enrollment of children who are attending kindergarten in this school year and wish to attend also in the 2018-2019 school year - will begin on May 7;
• Enrollment of new children will be held starting May 21.

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

Filling the available places, after the re-enrollment process is completed, will generally be done in descending order of age groups as follows: the large group (children aged 5), the middle group (children aged 4) and the small group (children aged 3). Based on Government Decision no. 1,252/2012 and within the limits of available places, children aged between 2 and 3 may also be enrolled in the small group.

If, in an educational institution, the number of enrollment requests exceeds the number of available places, general tie-breaking criteria and specific tie-breaking criteria will be applied successively.

The general criteria for tie-breaking are the following:

• Existence of a document proving that a child is an orphan of both parents (the situation of a child coming from an orphanage/a placement center/foster family is considered similar to that of a child orphaned of both parents);
• Existence of a document proving that the child is an orphan of a single parent;
• Existence of a brother/sister enrolled in the respective educational institution;
• Existence of a medical certificate attesting to the child’s degree of disability.

The specific tie-breaking criteria (developed by each preschool education unit, approved by its Board of Administration and approved by the County School Inspectorate/the Bucharest Municipality until May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-enrollment lists. Also, the specific tie-breaking criteria will be applied only after the general criteria are exhausted.

To ensure the transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the management of preschool education units will visibly display, for all interested, the following information:

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

We mention that private preschool education units are also obliged to visibly display information regarding their status, namely whether they are authorized to operate provisionally or accredited by the Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-university Education (ARACIP).