TEWKSBURY, N.J. (News 12 New Jersey LLC) – No one was seriously injured when a large tree fell onto a school bus in New Jersey Friday morning.

“My son was waiting. We heard this thunderous crash, and then eventually the garbage truck pulled around,” one witness, Andrea Foy, said.

Sanitation workers in the area came to the rescue, pulled the door open, and helped get the kids off the bus.

“Thankfully our garbage men were here, and they ran to the rescue and pulled the back door open and got them out,” another witness, Cindy Pello said.

The 10 students and driver on board were taken to a hospital for evaluation. They’ve since been released.

The school district said due to the excellent skills and calm demeanor of the bus driver, a potentially disastrous situation was averted.

The district gave a heartfelt thank you to the driver and emergency crews. Witnesses also gave special thanks to the sanitation workers.

“They’re the real heroes of today until the first responders got there,” Foy said.

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order last night calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education. Today, he said that he would transfer key responsibilities of the agency to other departments. It’s unclear whether those changes are possible without Congressional approval.

Trump’s executive order calls upon Education Secretary Linda McMahon “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while still “ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

“I think of it as an announcement of his policy priorities,” Brookings education and inequality researcher Rachel Perera said of the executive order. “They’re certainly testing the boundaries in terms of how much they can reshape the work of the department.”

Trump and McMahon have repeatedly stated that critical funding streams that schools rely on will continue to flow to states. But experts say that promises to move these programs out of the Education Department and into other departments, as well as the 50% staffing cuts seen last week, threaten the security of those dollars.

What could be the potential impact on Pennsylvania and New Jersey?

Pennsylvania’s public schools receive about $4.67 billion in federal funding. New Jersey receives about $1.2 billion. That includes funding under Title I, which supports schools in low-income communities, as well as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also known as IDEA, which distributes funding for special education and related services for children with disabilities.

Thousands of jobs are reliant on these funding streams. According to Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg, 1,449 jobs in Philadelphia alone are funded by Title I and the IDEA. New Jersey’s Education Law Center Executive Director Robert Kim said that 18,000 teaching jobs in New Jersey would be affected if federal education programs stopped operating.

“The idea that they would all still be operational, and that there would not be disruptions, delays or cancellations of a lot of these funding streams, is absolutely a fantasy,” Kim said.

A large tree fell onto a school bus in New Jersey Friday morning, sending 11 people to the hospital.

The bus was driving in Tewksbury Township when the crash occurred, according to Whitehouse Rescue Squad.  Photos provided by emergency rescue teams show severe damage to the front cab of the bus.

Medics took 11 people on board to a local hospital for treatment of minor injuries, officials said.  There, injured students were reunited with their parents.

There is no word yet on what caused the tree to fall, but winds were breezy at the time of the crash, gusting between 30-40 mph, according to a weather station in Readington.