Bernadine Reed
Age: 49.
Home turf: Darlington.
Claim to fame: Reed was honored as a local hero for getting 40 grade-school children safely off her burning school bus after a car rear-ended the vehicle.
If a movie is ever made: Who should play her? “Queen Latifah,” she says with a laugh.
Nerves of steel: Reed admits to being “a little bit adventurous.” She wants to go bungee jumping, likes to climb trees, and might try skydiving. “I want to jump out of an airplane, at least one time.”
In the family: Reed’s 27-year-old daughter, Shantee Jacobs, also plans to become a school bus driver.
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Two years ago, Bernadine Reed, who grew up in tiny Dovesville, left the noise and chaos of Baltimore, Maryland, to return to the peace and quiet of small-town life in rural South Carolina.
But on one winter morning earlier this year, Reed suddenly found herself in a life-and-death situation, trying to calm and corral 40 panicked first- through fifth-graders as smoke filled Darlington Public School Bus No. 3071.
“I told everybody, ‘We have to get off this bus now,’” Reed recalls.
A car had slammed into the back of the bus after Reed had stopped at a railroad crossing. Reed was able to guide the children, who were all crying and upset, out of the bus and to a nearby field. While flames consumed the vehicle, Reed was able to reach her supervisor and then called each child’s parents to let them know they were safe.
“Everybody looks at this as me being a hero. I tell them, ‘I’m just a mother that got 40 kids off a bus. That’s all,’” Reed says.
Reed attributes her ability to stay calm to the intensive training she received from Darlington County School District. When the accident happened, she had only been a driver for 45 days, but she has lots of experience caring for children.
“I’ve been around children all my life,” says Reed, who worked as a special needs educator and also ran her own daycare in Maryland. She has a passion for her “babies,” which is what she calls the children who ride her bus.
“All my kids love me. They call me ‘Miss BeeBee,’” she says. “I think kids are just drawn to me. I’m like a magnet for kids and they listen to me. They know they’re on Miss BeeBee’s bus and Miss BeeBee don’t play. We are on this bus to get to school and home, safe and sound.”