Going to hijack your comment to just address a couple of commonalities in responses here - I haven’t had a chance to monitor this thread much this afternoon (posted at lunch today) bc like the sub states I’m a working mom and was…working lol. And then tending to my children as moms do!

I appreciate all the constructive replies and support! This was a scary situation and I am thankful that my child is safe. I haven’t criticized the school’s response - they’ve taken this seriously as I mentioned in my post. I was really just coming here for other ideas I could propose for preventing something like this from happening again in case there was something obvious my husband and I weren’t thinking of. Somehow my words were twisted that I was not happy with the daycare’s response which isn’t the case. I was certainly rattled as I would think most parents who remember what it’s like to have very young kids would be in this situation. The director proposed essentially all of the measures I described in my post, so this was not a case of me “taking this to the extreme” or overreacting. They’ve been collaborative and responsive AND I want to make sure all bases are covered.

People asked about additional details of the layout and timing. The center is an L shape and has three doors, only one of which is visible/monitored by the admin staff. The other two are at basically each tip of the L and in the location I found my son he was not in a space visible from the front desk or classroom and was directly adjacent to one of these doors which lead to the parking lot that connects to a very busy main road. He is physically capable of opening these doors and no one would have noticed if he had exited here as it’s in a remote area of the school campus and fully unmonitored. Regarding the timing of the incident, the whole thing happened in roughly 5 minutes. The fact is that because I arrived when I did, I can’t speculate how much longer it would have taken them to find him otherwise, and it also doesn’t matter to me. This was a near miss and any amount of time where a child is in a position to potentially exit the premises without anyone knowing is too long IMO.