By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
WHEN Dawn Fredericks rushed to evacuate a group of Dandenong North students from a bus after a head-on crash in March this year, her reaction was instinctive – help the children.
It was this selflessness that saw the Ventura Bus Lines employee, who chaperones the students on their daily commute to and from school, awarded with an Ambulance Victoria Commendation.
There were hugs and tears aplenty when Ms Fredericks accepted her award at a special ceremony at Emerson Middle School on Thursday.
On 21 March, Ms Fredericks and 31 students from the specialist school were on board when the bus and a car collided on Nettle Drive, Hallam, wedging the vehicle underneath.
In the pandemonium after the crash, Ms Fredericks cracked open the rear window of the bus and helped the students escape. Two students were rushed to hospital but sustained only minor injuries.
“The first thing that came to my head was to check that everyone was okay, I had to move really quickly,” Ms Fredericks said.
“There were a couple of obvious injuries, scratches and nosebleeds and I went to the front and talked to them and told them it was going to be okay, we’re all right, you’re all safe.”
Chloe, one of the students on the bus, praised Ms Fredericks for her help throughout the traumatic incident.
“Dawn was amazing, she made sure we were all okay,” she said.
“She’s just an amazing person who’s always there for us on the bus.”
Chloe said that if Ms Fredericks hadn’t been there to help the students, they wouldn’t have known what to do.
“Everyone was crying, they were scared, they were terrified because they’d never been through this before,” she said.
MICA paramedic David Kervin, who attended the crash, said Ms Fredericks’ quick thinking in helping the students evacuate the bus was extremely important.
“Although Ambulance Victoria had a really good response time, there were still minutes before anyone had arrived where she was really the only person in charge able to comfort the kids despite injury to herself,” he said.
“I asked her when I arrived if she had any injuries and she said no and she didn’t appear to have any, but she had significant soft tissue injuries to her neck, where she’d been jolted, she’d had a bit of whiplash. But she never complained at all and just switched into gear.
“She was like a mother hen.”
Emerson School principal John Mooney said Ms Fredericks was a standout supervisor who had cultivated a strong rapport with the students on the bus and shown incredible calmness in responding to the crash.
The day after the incident, Ms Fredericks made sure she was back on the bus to care for the students.
“I kept my eyes on the children all the time,” Ms Fredericks said.
“The advantage was that I know them by name, it was easy for me to see a child wandering over there and call them back.
“I mentioned to this police person that I know these children by name and you can leave them to me.”
