By Gerri Miller
Elmore/Autauga News
Top Photo: John Benton with an administrator from the Pass Christian School District.
Helping others is more than just volunteering or doing community service for one Prattville man. For John Benton, it is his way of life.
A total of 108 trips and 30,024 miles on his car later, Benton, 52, has been helping people since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and surrounding areas in August of 2005. Katrina was the third-strongest hurricane to hit the United States in its history at the time. With maximum sustained winds of 175 mph, the storm killed a total of 1,833 people and left millions homeless in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The heavy death toll of the hurricane and the subsequent flooding it caused drew international attention, along with widespread and lasting criticism of how local, state and federal authorities handled the storm and its aftermath.
The mass exodus of people during and after Katrina represented one of the largest and most sudden relocations of people in U.S. history. Some 1.2 million Louisianians were displaced for months or even years, and thousands never returned.
Benton said his first cousin was a medical student at Louisiana State University. The cousin told him that Katrina’s aftermath had also wreaked havoc on the Mississippi Coast and that everyone in that area needed help.
“I reached out to the Mississippi Department of Education and was told that the schools needed help in Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian,” Benton said. “At first they needed everything – school supplies, textbooks, clothing and band instruments- but as the years went by after Katrina, they just needed basic school supplies.”
Benton said many retail businesses did not return to the storm-damaged areas. “In the last couple of years, hurricanes have started to hit again,” Benton said. “They started evacuating more students from Louisiana areas to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”
Most parents must drive to Mobile, Slidell or Baton Rouge to get basic school supplies, Benton said.
He said he normally contacts the schools in the summer, but this year he had to wait until October because of Covid issues and Hurricane Ida. In August 2021, Ida was a deadly and destructive Category 4 Atlantic hurricane that became the second-most damaging and intense hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. state of Louisiana on record, behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The school system he is helping in Pass Christian did not know after the storm how many students would evacuate to the area. “They reached out in October and said they needed help,” Benton said. “The school system had a lot of students who ended up evacuating there from Hurricane Ida.”
The school ended up with 2,000 K-12 students versus 1,600-1,700 pre-Katrina.
Benton said he wants to collect as many school supplies as possible so the schools won’t have to worry about getting more after the holidays. He is planning to travel to Pass Christian on November 19th to deliver the school supplies.
Benton is single and attends Frazier United Methodist Church in Montgomery. He was a cancer patient who had melanoma that traveled to one of his lymph nodes, but he has been cancer-free for four years. He works for the Social Security Administration in Birmingham.
His trips to the Mississippi Coast became even more meaningful when he found out that his late uncle was born in Bay St. Louis. His uncle’s mother was one of the first educators in that area and he still has a lot of family in Louisiana.
If you would like to help the students of Pass Christian with their basic school supply needs, e-mail Benton at [email protected]. If you would like to write a check, he will give you instructions in an e-mail.
The supplies that are needed the most are dry erasers (thick and thin), pencils, binders, dividers, earbuds/earphones, Clorox wipes and facial tissues.
