‘A nightmare’
Mom calls for better security after child goes missing from daycare
A mother who came to Montreal with her family from war-torn Ukraine this winter is asking that school security measures be tightened after her six-year-old son went missing from his daycare last week.
The school service centre responsible for the daycare said it regrets the error and promised to investigate the incident and make changes.
Last Friday, Oleksandra Syrovatska said her husband went to pick up their son, Mikhail, at the afterschool daycare run by Lajoie Elementary School in Outremont. He arrived at 5:20 p.m. to find his son was not there and staff at the daycare didn’t know where he was. Syrovatska took a taxi to get to the daycare and called 911 while en route. Police were sent to help look for their child. When she arrived at the school, she ran around the school perimeter, screaming her son’s name.
“It was a nightmare for me,” she wrote in an email sent to the Marguerite-bourgeoys scholastic service centre and the Montreal Gazette. “I thought I would die of pain. We have already suffered because of the war at home a lot. My son has just started adopting to everything here.”
Syrovatska and her husband and son came to Montreal in February, fleeing their home in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine that is under attack from Russian forces. Mikhail, who speaks only Russian, attends a first grade welcoming class designed for new arrivals at Lajoie Elementary. Syrovatska, an English teacher in Ukraine, now works at a daycare. Her husband, an electrician, works in a factory.
Syrovatska’s husband called friends who live near them to see if their son had gone home. The friends found Mikhail outside his parents’ apartment, which Syrovatska says is a 20-minute walk from the school, roughly an hour after he left the school.
“So tell me please how can it be that a six-year-old child not knowing English or French goes along the streets alone, how can it be that the staff of the daycare did not even notice him leaving school and then did not notice his absence?” Syrovatska wrote.
Her worry is amplified by the fact her son went missing inside the school, briefly, on two other occasions, she said.
“I want the school to improve it’s security system to make it better for kids, and so that staff are better able to look after the children, so nobody else has to go through this,” she told the Gazette. “My kid was out on the street. It’s not good.”
Chrystine Loriaux, head of communications for the Marguerite-bourgeoys service centre, said the daycare staff were shaken by the incident and alerted emergency services as soon as they found out the child was not on the school grounds.
“These are people who are very devoted, so when something like that happens, it’s very upsetting,” she said. All schools and daycares follow a strict protocol to ensure the security of students, but with 50,000 children, “it can happen sometimes that incidents occur that are unfortunate,” she said.
The service centre is investigating the incident and studying camera footage to see what occurred. It’s thought another family that arrived to pick up their child may have left a door open. Adjustments will be made to their security processes, she said.
The school director held a meeting with Syrovatska on Wednesday night. The director told her the school has hired an extra staff member to help monitor the children. She did not show Syrovatska video footage of the moment her son left the school, as Syrovatska requested, saying confidentiality regulations do not permit it.