A version of this article was originally published on HaltonHillsToday on Nov. 8.
A local bus driver is being recognized for her quick thinking on the road that kept her students safe in the face of a potentially serious collision.
Andrea Medeiros recently received the 2022 School Bus Driver Excellence Award from School Bus Ontario.
The Georgetown woman, who works for First Student and has been shuttling local children since 2014, said she was shocked when she learned she’d been chosen for the award.
“It’s a real honour,” she told HaltonHillsToday from inside the bus that was damaged during the near-miss earlier this year - now fixed and back on the road.
The incident occurred on a hot summer day when Medeiros was taking a class from Stewarttown Middle School on its final trip of the school year to Canada’s Wonderland.
On her way home from the amusement park, with a load of tired kids in a bus with no air conditioning, she was heading westbound on Major Mackenzie Drive when a scene one would expect to see in a movie started unfolding in front of her.
“I was getting ready to go on the 400 when two cars collided in the other (eastbound) lanes. You could hear their tires when they were braking, then a bang, and one just came flying towards me,” she recalled.
“I stomped on the brake and it (the car) hit the guardrails, then squeezed itself between my bus on the right side and the guardrails.I believe if I didn’t stop it, it would’ve went head-on into the driver behind me.”
After a brief moment of panic as she radioed the incident in to dispatch, she felt a sense of relief when she saw the driver and passenger in the car were somehow OK. All of Medeiros’ passengers were just fine as well, but her bus was damaged during the incident and had to be towed away.
The local woman is humble about her role in keeping her children safe, but her employer, First Student, was eager to sing her praises.
“It was one of those moments where clearly our driver’s heroic effort saved the day, and of course, the training she received as a First Student employee certainly was a contributing factor,” the company said in an online statement.
Medeiros was quick to recognize the dispatchers who helped her that day, and the other bus driver she was travelling with who took all 40 of the children from her bus and got them safely back to Georgetown.
“It was a mess, but we were able to keep it calm,” she said. ““Everybody was a big help.”
