Child left in crèche cupboard for 2 hours

A TURFFONTEIN, Johannesburg, mother was left fuming after she arrived at her child’s day-care centre to find he had been left alone in a closed, dark cupboard as punishment for making a noise.

The 5-year-old was left so traumatised after being in the cupboard for hours that he refuses to return to the non-profit Cotlands day-care centre, which he attended on Mondays and Wednesdays.

“Last night (Tuesday night) he screamed: ‘Please don’t leave me.’ He didn’t want to sit alone,” his mother, who may not be identified to protect his identity, said yesterday.

She dropped her son off at day care on Monday morning and returned early in the afternoon for a parents’ meeting.

When they saw her, day care supervisors suddenly remembered her 5-year-old son and fetched him from a storage cupboard in his classroom, she said.

The child had not been fed with the rest of the children.

“He was stuck frozen, he didn’t want to look at me. He just cried,” she said.

In the family’s flat yesterday, her son was reluctant to speak. When asked where the daycare teachers put him, he responded, “the rats’ room”.

But Cotlands says the child was only given a standard timeout of about five minutes, an amount of time the day-care centres uses for “disruptive” children based on their age.

The door of the storage cupboard had no lock, and Monica Stach, the Cotlands chief operating officer, claimed it had not been closed.

“When we do time-outs, it’s done in the same space as the other children,” she said.

However, the worker who was supervising the children had been suspended for leaving the child unattended after the other children went to lunch, which was against Cotlands’ discipline policy, Stach said.

Stach said the supervisor sometimes threatened the children by telling them the cupboard had rats, a practice she said Cotlands did not endorse.

The mother is furious, saying the child would have been forgotten in the cupboard all day if she had not showed up for the parents’ meeting.

Stach has urged the family to meet with Cotlands staff to try and resolve the matter in private.