Mom calls for more security after son disappears from daycare

Article content

A mother who arrived in Montreal with her family from war-torn Ukraine this winter is calling for tighter security measures at schools after her six-year-old son disappeared from daycare last week.

The school services center responsible for the daycare said it regrets the mistake and promised to investigate the incident and make changes.

Article content

Last Friday, Oleksandra Syrovatska said her husband went to pick up their son, Mikhail, from the after-school daycare run by Lajoie Elementary School in Outremont. She arrived at 5:20 pm to discover that her son was not there and that the daycare staff did not know where he was. Syrovatska took a taxi to get to the daycare and called 911 while she was on the way. She sent the police to help search for her son. When she arrived at school, she ran around the perimeter of the school shouting her son’s name.

Article content

“It was a nightmare for me,” she wrote in an email sent to the Marguerite-Bourgeoys school services center and the Montreal Gazette. “I thought I was going to die from pain. We have already suffered a lot because of the war at home. “My son has just started to embrace everything here.”

Syrovatska, her husband and son arrived in Montreal in February, fleeing their home in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which is under attack by Russian forces. Mikhail, who speaks only Russian, attends a first-grade welcome class designed for newcomers to Lajoie Elementary School. Syrovatska, an English teacher in Ukraine, now works in a daycare. Her husband, an electrician, works in a factory.

Syrovatska’s husband called friends who live nearby to see if their son had gone home. Friends found Mikhail outside his parents’ apartment, which Syrovatska said is a 20-minute walk from the school, about an hour after he left school.

“Then tell me, please, how can it be that a six-year-old child who doesn’t know English or French is walking alone on the street, how can it be that the daycare staff didn’t even notice that he was leaving school?” and then you didn’t realize? Her absence from him? Syrovatska wrote.

Article content

Her concern is amplified by the fact that her son disappeared inside school, briefly, on two other occasions, she said.

“I want the school to improve its security system so that it is better for the children and so that the staff can take better care of the children, so that no one else has to go through this,” he told the Gazette. “My son was on the street. He is not good. “

Chrystine Loriaux, head of communications at the Marguerite-Bourgeoys service centre, said daycare staff were shocked by the incident and alerted emergency services as soon as they discovered the child was not on school grounds.

“These are very devout people, so when something like this happens, it’s very disturbing,” he said. All schools and daycares follow strict protocol to ensure student safety, but with 50,000 children, “sometimes it can happen that incidents occur that are unfortunate,” she said.

The service center is investigating the incident and studying the camera footage to see what happened. It is believed another family who came to pick up their son may have left a door open. Adjustments will be made to its security processes, she said.

The school principal met with Syrovatska on Wednesday night. The principal told him that the school had hired an additional staff member to help monitor the children. He did not show Syrovatska video footage of the moment her son left school, as Syrovatska requested, saying confidentiality rules do not allow it.

Share this article in your social network