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 education unit:

• re-enrollment of children who are attending kindergarten this school year and wish to continue attending in the 2018-2019 school year - will begin on May 7th;
• enrollment of new children will be carried out starting May 21st.

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

The filling of available places, after the completion of the re-enrollment process, will generally be done 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 GD no. 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.

In the situation where, within an education unit, the number of enrollment requests is higher than the number of available places, general and specific tie-breaking criteria will be applied successively.

The general tie-breaking criteria are as follows:

• the 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 care is assimilated to the situation of a child orphaned of both parents);
• the existence of a document proving that the child is orphan of a single parent;
• the existence of a sibling enrolled in the respective education unit;
• the existence of a medical certificate for the child's classification in a degree of disability.

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

To ensure the transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the managements of preschool education units will post, in plain sight, for all interested, the following information:

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

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