A whirlwind of honors for heroic school-bus driver
Mayor Gloria Hines, left, presents Bernadine Reed a key to the city Photo by Bobby Bryant
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
This, more or less, was last week’s agenda for Bernadine Reed, the Darlington school-bus driver who got 40 students off a burning bus Jan. 22:
MONDAY, FEB. 11, 6 p.m.: Attend Darlington County Board of Education meeting to receive a plaque from the school district honoring “her calm attitude, quick thinking and heroic efforts to get her students out of a dangerous situation and keep them safe until help arrived.”
TUESDAY, FEB. 12, 1 p.m.: Attend a meeting of the State Board of Education in Columbia to be honored by the board members for her actions on the “momentous” day a car slammed into her bus from behind, starting a fire that soon engulfed half the bus, which was carrying 40 elementary-school students. Reed got them all off the bus unharmed, to national acclaim.
TUESDAY, FEB. 12, 6:30 p.m.: Attend a meeting of Darlington City Council to be given a key to the city by Mayor Gloria Hines in recognition of getting so many kids off the bus so quickly: “(Only) 45 days on the job!” Hines noted. “ … She’s a hero.”
In a 24-hour period, Reed was honored by three governing bodies – two of them local and one of them statewide – for averting what could have been “a total disaster,” as one firefighter put it, after the accident a month ago.
“I’m just a mother that got 40 kids off a bus to safety,” Reed said modestly as she met with reporters the day after the accident, which got national and even international news coverage.
Reed was just as modest during her 24-hour whirlwind awards tour, which began last Monday evening at the Darlington County School District offices.
County Education Superintendent Tim Newman read a summary of what happened on a frigid morning Jan. 22: “A state school bus transporting students to Brunson-Dargan Elementary and Cain Elementary was stopped at a railroad track when it was struck from behind by a car. The car caught on fire, and the flames spread to the bus.
“Bus driver Bernadine Reed quickly and calmly evacuated all 40 children from the bus and kept them safe until help arrived.”
From there, it was on to Columbia the next day to meet with state Education Superintendent Molly Spearman and to receive accolades from the State Board of Education. Then Reed rushed back to Darlington so the city could honor her at City Council’s regular monthly meeting.
Mayor Hines said that on the day of the bus accident, she was shocked to realize that Darlington was suddenly all over the national news. Reed’s work at the accident scene was “great,” Hines said. Brandishing a golden key to the city, Hines called out to Reed, who was sitting in the audience, “Come on down!”
But there was a tiny drop of rain on Reed’s parade. When city officials prepared the agenda for that night’s meeting, Reed’s first name was listed as Bernadette, not Bernadine. If anyone noticed, nobody complained. It was Reed’s day all the way.
