A troubling incident occurred today at my daughter’s kindergarten.
I didn’t experience it first-hand nevertheless it is concerning all the same.
My mom stepped in for me to pick Sophia up this afternoon as my husband and I were tied up elsewhere. The teachers at the school are familiar with my mom as she had been picking Sophia up recently while we were away.
She pressed the bell at the entrance and the door lock was released for her to enter, despite no adult being at the reception. Between the waiting area and the kindergarten entrance door was a reception area with a waist-high swivel door. There my mother found a little girl, younger looking than my 2.5 year old toddler.
This little child was in a state alright. She was weeping, wailing and crying continuously, calling for her mother, snot dripping and all. This went on for around 5 minutes at least.
My mother was rather confused at this sight and immediately tried to get a teacher’s attention via the doctor’s bell on the reception desk and also by looking through the window that looks into the playroom to summon someone.
Nobody came.
Meanwhile, she started getting panicked at the distraught state of the child. She tried to comfort her and talk to her from behind the reception desk by offering her words of comfort. She seemed to quieten down slightly but it did not console her much.
Finally a teacher comes out of the inner door and my mom questions her, “What is this child doing here all alone?” The teacher seems highly apologetic and surprised to find the child there. She apologises. My mom is appalled and informs them that she is definitely conveying this to Sophia’s parents.
Now I want to make one thing clear. My mom is not your typical softie grandmother who can’t bear to see a little child in tears. She is a former discipline teacher herself, while her mother was also a teacher and her father, a headmaster until retirement. We know that children need to be disciplined at times. And yes, time outs are a way of enforcing learnings in certain situations.
This was not it.
The story gets worse...
I get a call from teacher Florence a while after Sophia gets home. She speaks very fast and appears to want to get something off her chest. She tells me about the incident. But what she says doesn’t make what happened any better.
“This is a new student who was not used to being away from her mom. She was crying non stop and wanted to be alone. So we agreed upon this plan to keep her waiting at the front to wait for her mom, since her mom dropped her off there”.
You have got to be kidding me.
This makes it even worse. I asked Florence, “Do you mean to say the child told you she wanted to be alone? And… you actually left her alone?”
These are the people we are paying at least RM20,000 per year to care for and nurture our daughter. To show her what is right and wrong. To guide her as she navigates life without Mum and Dad on a daily basis. And this is how they handled a crying new student. This school is among the top private pre-schools in one of the country’s premier districts. We’ve lost all confidence.
Not only due to the lifelong emotional trauma this will cause the poor child but the potential security breach here.
I was told the teacher was watching the child on CCTV. That doesn’t make it any better. What if someone had slipped in behind my mom when they opened the door for her? The location of the school is adjacent to a popular mall, among office lots, with close proximity to restaurants, their front and backend staff, Grab drivers, valet parking attendants and just the general public.
This is the same neighbourhood that the 7-year-old expat’s son got kidnapped from many years ago while walking down the road to his international school. It wasn’t so bad when we initially enrolled our daughter because they were located in a quieter block which was less visible. Then they moved two months ago insisting this lot was better for the school.
Anyhow, you get the picture. As a parent of such a young child, you see something like this and ask yourself, “What if this happened to my child?”
“If this can happen to that child, it can happen to anybody’s child.”
They should have at least allocated one teacher to sit with this child outside. They could have sent the child to sit in the canteen, which is right behind the entrance door. So many possibilities of how this situation could have been handled better.
Now what? Send Sophia to school tomorrow and hope all is well? Are they going to single out my child because I voiced this out?
Food for thought.
Good night folks.
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