Bridge collapse hero is offered free tuition
Published: August 7, 2007
One of the heroes of the 35W bridge collapse has been offered a substantial reward.
The praise comes in the form of full tuition at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis. Jeremy Hernandez, 20, of Minneapolis, was on the Waite House school bus helping care for dozens of children on a field trip when the bridge fell away beneath them.
The bus ended up jammed against the side of the guard rail, teetering over a highway. Hernandez forced open the back door on the bus and assisted each child off the bus to safety.
“I had the good fortune of seeing Jeremy interviewed on CNN,” Dunwoody President Ben Wright said Monday afternoon. “I thought, what a wonderful young man.”
Wright was in Nova Scotia when the highway bridge fell into the Mississippi. Like most Americans he watched the disaster from afar. His staff finally reached him by cell phone.
“They indicated that all these calls were pouring in from alumni, people in the community and our own faculty and staff wanting to do something for Jeremy.”
Jeremy Hernandez was a student at Dunwoody studying auto mechanics, but left after just one quarter because of the cost. Now, the school is offering to take Jeremy back with his tuition paid in full by donations and the school.
“We have talked to Jeremy’s mother and made it clear to her that we want Jeremy, if he wants to, to feel free to come back to Dunwoody,” Wright said.
Dunwoody is a private school at the intersection of I-394 and I-94. Wright says the offer is equivalent to a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars.
“If he was paying 100 percent of his tuition here at Dunwoody, you know, a two-year program would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000.”
Wright insists Dunwoody does not want any student leaving the school for lack of funding. So far, Jeremy Herandez has not responded to the offer, but is said to be very pleased by the gesture.
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