Remember Miss Cinderella 1978?

A woman who won the Miss Cinderella title at Northwestern Oklahoma State University is now making national headlines. As a high school student Allyson Zaloudek from Kremlin won the Miss Cinderella title in 1978.

Now she is Allyson Reneau, the Oklahoma mother of 11 children, who saved ten girls from the Afghan robotics team during the Taliban takeover.

Reneau met the girls, ages 16-18, at Explore Mars' annual Humans to Mars conference in 2019 and has kept in touch with them.

The night of Aug. 3 she was unable to sleep in her Norman home after learning what was going on in Afghanistan.

She contacted Senator James Inhofe who put her in touch with the Senate military liaison. It soon became apparent that he was already overwhelmed helping American citizens in Afghanistan.

She finally decided to fly to Qatar to see what she could do. She remembered a former roommate in Washington, DC now worked at the U.S. Embassy in Qatar and called her before boarding the plane. Her former roommate drew up an application and spent the night at the embassy preparing necessary documents. During this time, Reneau collected all the girls' passports.

In the past week, 10 of the girls were flown from their hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, to Qatar which is located on the western side of the Persian Gulf. The girls plan to continue their education in Qatar.

Reneau is now working to rescue 25 other girls and their mentors from Afghanistan.

This is not the first time Reneau has made the news. An Associated Press (AP) story reported on her imminent graduation from the University of Oklahoma, after a 30 year delay, and her acceptance into the master's program at Harvard.

Reneau dropped out of OU in 1981 to get married and start a family. She began classes at the University of Oklahoma in 1979. A former world champion baton twirler, Reneau beat out more than 140 people for a position as the featured twirler at OU. She was named a Top-10 Freshman and served as vice president of her sorority, Chi Omega. She left after her sophomore year.

"I always said when the baby was 5, I would go back and finish my degree," she said in the AP story. "But there were 11 babies."

For 20 years she was a stay-at-home mom. She cooked, cleaned and cheered for her children at baseball games, violin concerts and more.

In 2000, Reneau opened Victory Gymnastics. The gym started with one athlete, her daughter. According to the AP report in 2011 as many as 500 athletes were training there. Reneau is also director of Victory Academy, a school attached to the gym.

After her youngest daughter turned five, Reneau made an appointment with an advisor at OU. She learned a lot had changed in 30 years. Attending classes during the day so she could spend evenings with her family, Reneau found her classmates who were half her age all had laptops while she had a pen and paper.

After graduating in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in communications, Reneau began classes at Harvard, making the 3,000 mile trip each week. Before graduating with her master's in international business relations in May 2016, she studied piano at Julliard, the famous private performing arts conservatory in New York City.

Reaneau's Harvard thesis on US space policy has won awards and has been published several times.

From Miss Cinderella to Harvard and the rescue of Afghan girls, Reneau has had a remarkable journey.