Bass Hill: Childcare educator found guilty after boy escaped
A family daycare educator has been sentenced in court after one of the children they were in charge of slipped through a door and wandered off to the nearby main road in southwest Sydney.
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A childcare educator has been fined after a 22-month-old boy who escaped from his family day care centre in Bass Hill and was found wandering on the busy Hume Highway.
On Friday, the educator was convicted of three offences and fened $250 for each of them by Bankstown Local Court Magistrate Peter Bugden.
The maximum fine for each of these offences was $10,000.
The owner of the childcare centre had previously pleaded guilty to the charge children in her care were not adequately supervised after the incident on March 23, 2018.
According to documents tendered to the courts, the educator had left the 22-month-old boy in the care of her daughter at her daycare centre to pick up another child.
The educator had picked up three children in her car, including the 22-month-boy, on March 23 last year but had to collect a fourth child.
Because there was no room in the car, she dropped the boy off at her Bass Hill home about 9am leaving him in the care of her daughter, then aged 21, before leaving to collect the other child.
The educator’s daughter took the boy inside before going to the toilet.
The boy had disappeared when she came out of the toilet about three or four minutes later, and she saw the front door was open, the documents state.
Luckily, two women found the boy between 9.30am and 10.30am at the traffic lights on the busy Hume Highway, around the corner of the car centre.
The educator then found the woman with the boy and told her she was his carer. When asked if she was the boy’s mother, she had said yes, according to the court documents.
The woman faced other charges relating to the incident but the public prosecutor withdrew one charge on Friday morning.
Her defence lawyer Eli Srour, who provided several character references for his client, said the educator was very educated and highly regarded in the community
On Friday, she was found guilty and fined for not protecting children, child not adequately supervised and child not adequately supervised.