When Donna Noble heard that someone was killed in a school bus crash, she said she just knew it was her daughter.

"I just knew it was her, mother's intuition, maybe," she told CTV Edmonton.

Jennifer Dawn Noble, 17, was killed just a few kilometres from her Rimbey, Alta. home Wednesday morning when her school bus stopped on Highway 53 and was rear-ended by a gravel truck.

"I said goodbye to her at 7:50 a.m. and by the time I got to work she was gone," Noble said.

She was Donna and Jim Noble's only child.

Her mother described Jennifer as a bright and happy honour roll student. She smiled as she reminisced about a joke her daughter made, but her darkened, patchy eyes said that she was not prepared to be memorializing her daughter at such a young age.

"You go down to her room and you see it as if she's still going to walk through that door," Noble said.

At several points during the interview, she still referred to her daughter in the present tense.

Jennifer lived in the same home all her life, helping raise animals on the family farm. She had planned to become a veterinarian.

"She loved being on the farm, she loved her animals," her mother said. "She was an honour roll student who had so many dreams left to fulfill and was looking so forward to graduation."

Just months away from graduating, Jennifer had just purchased her prom dress last Saturday.

"She looked so pretty in it," Noble said, her voice shaking.

Jennifer owned a car, but preferred to take the bus to school, her mother explained.

"She looked forward to visiting those kids and loved her bus driver to bits."

It was a foggy morning when Jennifer was killed and the Nobles say they don't blame anyone for the crash.

"It was foggy yesterday morning," Donna Noble said. "Sometimes you start to wonder if it was worth to run the buses because they had shut them down or delayed them by a couple of hours in the past, but who's to say? And you can't second guess because you'll just beat yourself up."

The RCMP has finished their on-site investigations and are looking at factors that might have caused the accident, including the fog.

Improving bus safety

But the Alberta government is already looking at steps to prevent another school bus tragedy.

On Thursday, Premier Ed Stelmach expressed his condolences to the Nobles and said something has to be done to ensure safer transportation for Alberta's children.

Stelmach said additional seatbelts and flashing lights will only do so much and said Alberta drivers are not showing school buses enough respect.

Last October, a nine-year-old girl died in Calgary when her school bus crashed into a parked gravel truck.

Stelmach said his government will look at any and all safety precautions, including flashing strobe lights.

"Something that will improve safety, we'll definitely give full consideration," Stelmach said.

They are installed on some Alberta buses but are not mandatory. The bus that Jennifer died on was without one.

Meanwhile, mothers in Rimbey told CTV News that there should be stronger protocol on what type of weather cancels buses.

"You couldn't see ten feet, I couldn't see out my driveway," one mother said.

A clearly-emotional Stelmach recounted an incident in his youth for reporters. Forty years ago, near the town where he grew up, a school bus was torn in half in an accident, killing 17 students.

With reports from CTV Edmonton's Adam Kuzina and Dave Ewasuk