Should this be the end of Day care for my child?
Hello all, new here, I would like your thoughts on this sticky situation at a day care
I have a son who is almost 3 and has been in full-time daycare since he turned 2. For the first year, things went great. However, over the past two weeks, he has started frequently eloping (running away) from his teachers. He is escaping the classroom into an unsupervised area of the building, which is incredibly dangerous. Because of this, the daycare has been calling me every single day to pick him up early, and I'm at my wits' end trying to find a solution.
The facility is shaped like three concentric circles:
- The Core: An unsupervised, common central hallway/atrium where parents enter.
- The Middle Ring: The actual classrooms.
- The Outer Ring: The fenced-in playgrounds.
Because of this layout, every classroom has two doors. One door leads out to the secure playground, which stays locked from the outside per policy. The other door leads inward to that central, unsupervised common area.
This inward-facing door is required to stay completely unlocked at all times for fire safety and parent access. The only barrier is an alarm that chirps when it opens. Because there are no gates or physical latches inside the classroom, my son can easily elope straight into the central hallway the second a teacher turns their back.
Over the last two weeks, the facility's Training & Curriculum (T&C) Specialist has been working tirelessly with us. After reviewing video footage and observing him, she concluded that his main trigger is that he gets bored incredibly fast—he needs to switch activities every 5 minutes. The moment an activity ends, his sudden impulse is to stand up and bolt straight for the door. She has even engaged a behavioral health specialist to help us address this.
The problem is consistency. These two specialists are only in the building 3 to 4 days a week. The 1 or 2 days a week they are absent, the regular classroom teachers can't handle it. On those days, I get calls to pick him up as early as noon, which is heavily disrupting my work hours. I don't think i know who the director is of this day care, and they have never reach out about this issue, yet. So i'm assuming is not a big deal for them.
For context on staffing: the classroom has a 1:7 teacher-to-child ratio. However, it's structured as two separate groups of 7 kids, with one 'floating' teacher who moves back and forth between the two groups to help out.
I would love your insights on a few things:
- Is this a standard safety setup? Is it typical for a facility to leave a primary door completely unlocked with just a door-chime as a barrier, or is this a valid licensing/safety violation I can push back on for safety measures?
- How do I handle the daily or every other day pickup calls? It is wrecking my work schedule. Would this be a facility engineering flaw which it shouldn't be treated as a behavioral reason to send my kid home?
- Should we give up on the day care? Is it safer to just withdraw him entirely and look into home care options?
- Any thoughts, or insight or experience in this, would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!