Any mother would agree that words couldn’t describe how it would feel to arrive at their child’s school or day care and discover that the little one is not only gone but had left with a stranger. That was the exact reality a mother in Australia faced when she arrived at First Steps Learning Academy in Bangor to pick up her 1-year-old child and discovered the child was missing.
@sydneymorningherald A “traumatised” Sydney mother is blaming her toddler’s day-care centre for “losing him” for two hours after a grandfather was allowed to mistakenly take home the wrong child. #sydneynews #childcare ♬ original sound – Sydney Morning Herald
The day care had sent her sleeping child home with a grandparent who unknowingly collected the wrong child.
“They couldn’t tell me [the man’s] name, they couldn’t tell me who he was, they couldn’t tell me who he was meant to pick up. They couldn’t tell me what he looked like, apart from that he was wearing shorts and he was an older gentleman,” the mother, who asked not to be named, told The Sydney Morning Herald, according to the BBC.
Safety protocols at the center and most day care facilities across the world do not allow children to be collected by anyone who isn’t preapproved to pick them up.
According to the grandfather’s wife, he was extremely distraught when he discovered he had taken home the wrong child and rushed back to the center as soon as he realized it, saying he was “devastated” and “owned the mistake.”
The mother of the misplaced child harbors no ill will toward him. “We are not angry with him. We are not upset at him – we blame the daycare,” she said.
Nursery director Trisha Hastie told the BBC that the worker involved was “stood down,” otherwise known in the US as temporarily suspended immediately.
“We sincerely apologize to the families directly involved in this deeply upsetting and isolated incident,” Hastie said.
The Guardian reported that the New South Wales’ Early Childhood Education and Care Regulatory Authority is conducting a “thorough investigation” to determine how the “deeply concerning and serious incident” occurred.
“The … regulatory authority investigation will consider the service’s compliance history,” the regulator said, adding New South Wales police had been notified and further explained there was no record of the center having other investigations open.
Hastie insisted this has never happened at the Bangor facility or any other of the center’s locations.
“While we have always maintained strict protocols for drop-off and pick-up, in this case, those processes were not followed correctly. The educator involved has been stood down,” she shared in a statement, per The Guardian. “We have acted immediately to strengthen our procedures and ensure this never happens again.”
