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

• re-enrollment of children who attend kindergarten in this school year and wish to continue in the 2018-2019 school year - will begin on May 7;
• enrollment of new children will take place 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 available), and possibly on the school inspectorate websites.

The filling of available places, after the re-enrollment process is finalized, will generally be done 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). Based on Government Decision no. 1252/2012 and within the limit of available places, children aged between 2 and 3 years may also be enrolled in the small group.

If, in an educational institution, the number of enrollment requests exceeds the number of available spots, general and specific selection criteria will be applied, successively.

The general selection criteria are as follows:

• existence of a document proving that a child is orphaned by both parents (the situation of a child from a children's home/foster center/family foster care is considered similar to that of a child orphaned by both parents);
• existence of a document proving the child is orphaned by one parent;
• existence of a brother/sister enrolled in the respective educational institution;
• existence of a medical certificate attesting the child's disability degree.

The specific selection criteria (developed by each preschool institution, approved by its Board of Administration, and endorsed by the County School Inspectorate/of the municipality of Bucharest until May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-enrollment lists. Also, the specific selection criteria will only be applied after the exhaustion of the general criteria.

To ensure the transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the management of preschool educational institutions will publicly 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 by the schooling plan for the 2018-2019 school year (by age group: small, middle, big);
• the general and specific criteria for children's enrollment;
• the number of children re-enrolled/enrolled daily (within the set period) out of the total available.

We mention that private preschool institutions also have the obligation to visibly display information regarding their status, specifically whether they are authorized to operate provisionally or are accredited by the Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-University Education (ARACIP).