A severe incident occurred last week at a kindergarten in Tel Aviv after staffing shortages left the facility inadequately supervised.
Three girls, just four and a half years old, managed to leave the kindergarten grounds without any staff member noticing. The children remained outside the facility for approximately 45 minutes. The incident was reported today (Sunday) by Kan News.
On the morning of the incident, the kindergarten teacher did not arrive for work. Only two teaching assistants opened the kindergarten, located in the city's wholesale market district, after receiving special authorization from the Ministry of Education.
The three girls reportedly worked together to carry out an escape plan. One of them climbed onto a chair and reached the door-release button, while the other two succeeded in opening the gate.
After leaving the kindergarten, the girls wandered for nearly 45 minutes around the complex where one of them lives, until a security guard at one of the buildings recognized the child and notified her mother.
The failure continued inside the kindergarten. Staff only realized the girls were missing when the after-school program manager arrived and noticed that the gate was open. One assistant left to search for the children, while the second assistant, who remained at the kindergarten, reportedly fainted from stress, leaving the other children alone in the building.
One of the fathers at the kindergarten described the family's distress following the incident: "No one even thought to call the parents of those girls and tell them what had really happened. If it hadn't been for the alertness of the after-school program guard, who arrived and saw that the cluster's door had been breached and left open, and noticed a chair next to the door and realized something was wrong-and thanks to the vigilance of a security guard from one of the buildings, who also found the girls and was the one who called their mothers..."
The father suggested that without the intervention of the two security guards, the outcome could have been far more serious.