Unfortunately, as summer rolls around again in the United States, so do the endless stories of children left in hot vehicles. This isn’t the first of the year, but as with every tragedy, it is worth mentioning and remembering.

Per news reports, a five-month-old girl was found by her own mother in a van outside the Ewing’s Love & Hope Preschool and Academy in Jacksonville, Florida. Mom called the school for an update on her daughter and staff told her that they had not seen her. The mother herself went to the center, found her daughter in the van, was told by staff that they had no idea how long she’d been left in the vehicle…it’s too much to imagine. She was rushed to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead that afternoon. Per reports, she had been in the van for at least five hours, from 8 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon when discovered.

How can daycare vehicular heat deaths be prevented?

Almost all of these kinds of deaths are preventable. In this case, it wasn’t the standard situation of a parent forgetting her child in a vehicle; here the hired, professional, surrogate parents (because that’s what you are when you’re a teacher; you’re a professional, surrogate parent) did. There is literally nothing the child’s parents could have done to prevent this short of not trusting the school with their children that day, which defeats the purpose of school itself. The school could have prevented or at least significantly reduced the odds of such a death occurring through a number of methods, including a checklist system in which each student checked onto the bus needed to be checked off the bus before the bus driver could lock the vehicle, or through a walk-through system in which the bus driver would walk from the front to the back of the bus before locking it upon his or her return to the front of the vehicle. There are many ways to reduce the likelihoods of these tragedies; unfortunately, they arrived too late for this family.