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

• re-enrollment of children who attend kindergarten this school year and wish to attend in the 2018-2019 school year as well – will start 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 other interested parties, including on its website (if it exists), and possibly on the websites of school inspectorates.

The filling of available spots, after the completion of the re-enrollment process, will generally be made in descending order of the 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 no. 1,252/2012 and within the limit of available spots, children between 2 and 3 years old can also be enrolled in the small group.

If, in an educational institution, the number of enrollment requests is greater than the number of available spots, general tie-breaker criteria and specific tie-breaker criteria will be applied, successively.

The general tie-breaker 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/family placement is equivalent to that of a child orphaned by both parents);
• the existence of a document proving that the child is orphaned by one parent;
• the existence of a brother or sister enrolled in the respective educational institution;
• the existence of a medical certificate classifying the child as disabled.

The specific tie-breaker criteria (elaborated by each preschool educational institution, approved by its Administrative Council and endorsed by the County/Bucharest School Inspectorate by May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-enrollment lists. Also, the specific tie-breaker criteria will be applied only after the general criteria are exhausted.

To ensure transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the management of preschool educational institutions will display in a visible place, for all those interested, the following information:

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

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