When BrendaJean Adamson was an education assistant at Normal Park, she would gather her students, lead them outside for recess and tell them to reach high, grab two fistfuls of sunshine and tuck them into their pockets. The day might be bright, she’d say, but darker ones would surely follow, and they would need the warmth and light to carry them through.
Years later, as principal of Woodmore Elementary School, Adamson was pulled into a darkness no educator is prepared to face, racing toward the wreckage of a school bus crash that had already taken five young lives and injured over 30.
“The wreck happened Nov. 21, 2016,” Adamson says, as if reciting a date etched into a headstone.
The crash occurred just before 3:30 p.m. on Talley Road, a narrow, winding corridor in Chattanooga’s Brainerd neighborhood. A bus operated by Durham School Services was carrying 37 students home from Woodmore Elementary School when it veered off the roadway. Interior cameras documented the moments leading up to the impact.
Court records state that the driver first swerved to the right, striking an elevated driveway and a mailbox. The bus then crossed back to the left, where it hit a telephone pole and a tree before overturning. The force of the crash left the vehicle on its side along the roadside.
Emergency crews remained at the scene for hours, working methodically to remove children from the wreckage. Although the final child was taken from the bus around 4:30 p.m., responders continued their efforts well into the evening as families gathered nearby, waiting for confirmation and clarity.
In the days that followed, the darkness Adamson once warned her students about was no longer abstract. It had arrived, sudden and oppressive, and she would have to lead her school through it, even as she began the private work of reckoning with it herself.
Let each child know they’re OK
In the nine years since the crash, Adamson has chosen not to give interviews about what she experienced in the immediate aftermath and in the months that followed. Even now, she says she’s reluctant to open the doors that hold those memories – not because a flood of emotion would spill out or because she wishes to keep the details private, but because she doesn’t want any story that’s written to be about her.
“I didn’t lose a child that day,” she says. “I’ve never lost a child, so I don’t know what it feels like to lose a son or a daughter. I don’t want my story to overshadow the mama who lost her baby that day.”
Adamson might not have lost a biological child that day, but she did lose six students – including one who succumbed to his injuries later that week. In the moments, hours and days that followed, her actions were not those of a grieving parent, yet they revealed a love for the children that was deep and protective.
There’s the moment she learned of the wreck from a staff member during dismissal, handed off responsibility without hesitation and drove straight to the scene. Footage still viewable online shows her van idling nearby with its flashers on.
There’s the moment she ran past an officer who tried to stop her from entering the crash site, telling him, “These are my kids.”
There’s the way adrenaline carried her through triage, steadying the children who were calling her name, then calling their parents to say what had happened – and that their children were alive.
There’s the moment at Erlanger, after the last child had been pulled from the bus nearly an hour after crash, when she scanned a list of hospital patients and told someone two of the names were not her students. She knew this because she knew the first and last names of hundreds of children.
“When I went to Bryan College, President (William) Brown knew all of our names. That made an impact on me. He even knew where I was from. He’d say, ‘BrendaJean Adamson, Ooltewah, Tennessee.’ So it was important for me to learn my students’ names.
“At Woodmore, the assistant principal and I competed to see who could learn them all first. I didn’t know everybody’s name at the time, but I was on my way.”
There were the moments she stood with her teachers, identifying children by a belt buckle, a pair of shoes or some other small detail.
And there was her decision to have school the next day. Adamson wanted to walk into every classroom, look each child in the eye and tell them they would be OK. Each time she stepped back into the hallway, she sank into the arms of a friend waiting in the corridor and wept.
As Adamson recalls the tragedy, she says these scenes are returning with cinematic clarity. But she remains composed, the grip those images once held over her eased by grueling therapy that slowly broke through trauma so severe it stole her voice.
So, Adamson has agreed to tell her chapter in the story of the Woodmore bus crash. But she still insists it’s not about her. Rather, it’s about the people who hear it, recognize their own need for help, push past the stigma surrounding mental health and begin their own healing.
The master key
The teaching bug bit Adamson when her children were young. A mother of three, she earned her alternative license after working in reading intervention at Normal Park. She later taught kindergarten and first grade there before transferring to Ooltewah Elementary School.
At Ooltewah, principal Jill Levine told her she saw in Adamson the makings of an administrator.
“We talked about the fact that I was impacting 25 students in my classroom,” Adamson says. “And how powerful it would be to impact teachers who were each impacting 25 students of their own.”
After serving as assistant principal at Ooltewah, Adamson was named principal of Woodmore Elementary. Even before the school year began, she approached the job with the enthusiasm of an idealist convinced that education could pry open doors many believed were permanently nailed shut.
Her first task was as symbolic as it was practical: rally the community to give the 62-year-old building a bright new coat of paint during the summer break.
“I wanted the children to walk in on the first day and see freshly painted doors,” Adamson says. “I wanted them to know we cared not just about the building but also about them.”
Fresh paint was only the beginning. As principal, Adamson made a nonnegotiable commitment: every student would receive reading instruction every day. Reading, she believed, was the master key.
“It wasn’t reading for the sake of reading,” she says. “It was foundational, research-based instruction – the kind that truly moves the needle for students.”
Adamson also set out to weave the school more tightly into the fabric of the community. The Public Education Foundation hosted Woodmore, giving her the support to strengthen the staff. Police officers, EPB employees and even Adamson’s father, a builder, began eating lunch with students every Thursday, exposing them to careers and possibilities beyond their neighborhoods. Monumental Baptist Church delivered weekly goodie bags.
“Anytime I picked up the phone with a request, someone in the community was willing to step up,” Adamson says.
The outpouring of support that buoyed Woodmore Elementary didn’t recede after the crash. If anything, it swelled – and carried her with it.
“I felt prayers and love from people I’d never meet,” she says. “I was at a diner in Ooltewah when someone realized who I was and told her son, ‘This is the lady we prayed for.’ That felt like the grace of God.”
Then came a December day when Adamson found herself sitting alone on her deck, with nothing left to say.
When her voice went quiet
Adamson first came to understand the power of therapy in 1987, after a brother was killed in a boating accident. She began counseling as a grieving eighth grader and, over the years, continued therapy as a regular part of maintaining her mental health. So when the crash happened on a Monday, she was in her therapist’s office Tuesday.
Even as she navigated her own aftermath, Adamson urged others to seek help – for themselves and their children. She understood both the benefit and the barrier: mental illness and treatment still carry stigma, particularly in Black and brown communities.
“I literally got on my knees and begged families to send their children to therapy after the wreck because I knew the importance of it,” she says. “I shared my story about being an eighth grader who lost a brother tragically to a drowning. I looked at a mama and told her, ‘Please let him go to therapy. When I was in the eighth grade, it helped me, and I’m brown like you.’ I was adamant about that.”
At first, Adamson attended intensive therapy sessions every few days. But her lived experience proved more disorienting than she was expecting. She compares the first month after the crash to a flip book, pages snapping past in a blur and events moving so quickly there was no time to absorb them.
“I didn’t realize how much the crash was affecting me at first because I was constantly moving – going back and forth to TC Thompson’s and Erlanger since we had kids in both. I stayed busy, and I think that kept me from seeing what was really happening inside me.
“The first sign was sitting out on the deck and realizing I had nothing to say. That wasn’t like me. Then there were moments when I’d completely break down – curled up in the fetal position, sobbing – not just for my own pain, but for the grief I carried for those families who had lost their children.
“The moment I truly understood I wasn’t as OK as I needed to be was when I felt like I’d gone mute. I had nothing left to say.”
Recognizing she was hanging by a thread sharpened Adamson’s conviction about confronting trauma early, before it embeds too deeply. She began EMDR – eye movement desensitization and reprocessing – an evidence-based psychotherapy designed to ease the distress associated with traumatic memories.
At the time, she could feel the trauma physically. She’d begun to forget to breathe, holding her breath without realizing it. EMDR required working with a trained clinician who guided her back to the scene of the traumatic event in a structured, controlled way.
The goal was not to relive the pain indefinitely but to reprocess it, allowing her mind and body to release what they had been gripping so tightly. Having a therapist who was clinically aligned and methodical in that work proved essential, she says.
Alongside EMDR, Adamson committed to weekly cognitive behavioral therapy, a routine she maintained for about a year. The consistency of those sessions created a stabilizing framework around her life during a period when little else felt steady. Over time, she noticed a measurable shift: she could self-regulate again without relying as heavily on clinical intervention.
“As the most acute phase of therapy started to wind down, I realized I still needed ways to take care of myself day to day,” Adamson says. “So I began doing simple, grounding things – putting my toes in the dirt, sitting by the lake, journaling my thoughts. Those practices helped me find my breath again.”
The world was hers again
After the school year ended, the role Adamson once inhabited with confidence no longer fit the same way. When she asked to be reassigned to Ooltewah Elementary, the principal there agreed to have her return as assistant principal. What followed, she says, was a growing realization that the environment to which she had devoted herself no longer had room for the supports she required.
Here, Adamson pauses, drawing a slow breath before continuing.
“At that juncture, Hamilton County Schools did not give me the accommodations I needed to function well in the school setting. And without those supports, I was not going to be the best educator I could be.”
The decision that followed was definitive, and she and HCS parted ways. Without offering specifics, Adamson says part of the impasse involved her use of a service animal, a Black German Shepherd named Kona.
Looking for a new direction, she joined her father’s company, Adamson Developers, a Chattanooga-based general contractor, where she served as vice president of operations. The role became a bridge into real estate and deeper community involvement. Now, nearly nine years removed from the Woodmore tragedy – and from her only year as a school principal – she works as a sales associate with Stone River Construction and holds her license with The Group Real Estate Brokerage.
“Adamson Developers gave me the accommodations I needed,” she explains. “At the time, I was dealing with depression and the anxiety of facing the world after the wreck. Some days, getting out of bed was hard. Kona was able to go to work with me. I went to see architects and bankers with her. I’ve been in and out of the mayor’s office with her. The world was mine again because I had Kona.”
Kona was incorporated into Adamson’s therapeutic treatment plan until she gradually no longer needed that level of support. Adamson speaks openly about it, she says, because accommodations for mental health should not be controversial.
“We need to work with people to help make that happen so that we can create that stability for them to then get healthier.”
The sun will shine again
Adamson has found that stability. Now, with her feet on solid ground, she’s turning her lived experience into a tool that helps others and challenges the stigma surrounding mental health and therapy.
A key part of that effort is KONA, an online mental wellness community she created on SKOOL, an online platform that allows users to host groups, share content and engage members through community feeds, classrooms and built-in achievements. She titled the community after her service animal, whose name was an acronym for “Keep on nudging ahead.”
“My daily mantra during therapy became, ‘A nudge ahead is better than staying in bed.’ That’s what got me up and going,” she says. “I started to realize that when we stitch together good choices, they become great outcomes. I feel like I’ve nudged ahead enough to be able to support others therapeutically.”
(Those interested in joining KONA can request a link by emailing konaskoolcommunity@gmail.com.)
As Adamson arrives not at the end of her story but at this chapter of it, she offers simple advice for those who want to support someone experiencing trauma: simply tell them you are there.
“Sometimes, we don’t know how to show up for someone in trauma,” she says. “Shortly after the wreck, I ran into a mom from my son’s preschool at the mall. I didn’t even realize I had PTSD. She hugged me and said, ‘I don’t know how to be here for you. I might say the wrong thing, but I’m here.’”
She pauses.
“That was powerful. Sometimes support is simply saying, ‘I don’t know what to say, but I care.’”
As therapy began to restore her, Adamson returned to an old ritual, this time without the students she once taught. On cloudless days, she steps outside, reaches up, grabs two fistfuls of sunshine and tucks them into her pockets. The day might be bright, but she knows darker ones will come, and she’ll need the warmth and light to carry her.
“When I have a dark day or a difficult moment, I go back to those memories of things that were good,” she says. “Maybe it’s a note from a student saying, ‘You’re amazing. Thank you for loving me.’ And then I remember that the sun has shone before – and it’s going to shine again.”