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

• re-enrollment of children who are attending kindergarten this school year and wish to attend it also 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 visibly posted in each kindergarten for the information of parents and the interested public, including on its website (if there is one), and possibly on the County School Inspectorate's websites.

The filling of available places, after the re-enrollment process is finalized, will generally be carried out in descending order of age groups, as follows: large group (5-year-old children), middle group (4-year-old children), and small group (3-year-old children). Based on Government Decision nr. 1.252/2012 and within the limits of available places, children aged between 2 and 3 years can also be enrolled in the small group.

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

The general selection criteria are the following:

• the existence of a document proving that a child is an orphan of both parents (the case of a child coming from an orphanage/foster care/foster family is assimilated to the situation of a child orphaned of both parents);
• the existence of a document proving that the child is orphaned of one parent;
• the existence of a brother/sister enrolled in the respective educational institution;
• the existence of a medical certificate attesting the child's classification with a degree of disability.

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

To ensure transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the management of the preschool educational institutions will visibly post for all interested parties the following information:

• the institution's capacity (the number of children it was designed for);
• the number of places approved by the enrollment 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 children re-enrolled/enrolled daily (within the set period) out of the total available.

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