‘Power is in your hands’: Disasters didn’t stop this area valedictorian
It was about 4:30 in the morning when Dewayne Benson yawned awake in his window seat.
He and about 45 members of Channelview High School’s marching band had been on the road for about seven hours since leaving Disney World, and they had another seven before they would arrive back at the industrial east Houston suburb. His pupils hardly had adjusted to the dim, orange lights above when he heard his band director’s voice calling out to the bus driver.
“Harry? Harry?”
Benson does not remember feeling the bus plow through the concrete barrier on the side of the overpass. He does remember his stomach flipping in an instant, feeling like he was on rollercoaster, then a violent crash. The hum of the bus engine was replaced with the screams of classmates jolted awake by broken bones.
It has been two years and two months since the First Class Tours Charter bus carrying Benson and his classmates plunged off an overpass on Interstate 10 in Alabama and slammed into a ravine 40 feet below. Bus driver Harry Caligone, who apparently suffered a heart attack shortly before the accident, died, and all but two of the Channelview staff and students were injured — some critically. Benson was one of the two.
It was the most personal of several disasters that marked the 18-year-old’s time at Channelview High School. There was Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which spared his house and much of the 9,700-student school district. Then in April last year, a chemical fire and explosion at the Intercontinental Terminals Company plant in Deer Park sent a black plume floating above the campus, closing it for several days. Rains from Tropical Storm Imelda sent two barges crashing into an I-10 bridge near Channelview in September, leaving the freeway partially closed for months. And now, as Benson and
the class of 2020 prepare to graduate, a worldwide pandemic has cut his final school year short.
Benson did not let any of that slow him down. He is the school’s valedictorian and last month learned he had won a prestigious Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Scholarship, which promises to fund all aspects of his education — including room and board — through graduate school. Benson is so accomplished that he and his college adviser, Steven Shoemaker, have had to turn down scholarships from groups like the local Rotary Club.
He said the disasters that have punctuated his and other local 2020 grads’ high school experiences have been a learning experience.
“I think that there’s always some positive found to be in every negative,” Benson said. “Even with coronavirus and Harvey — very, very traumatic events — we can always come up and be stronger and be ready for whatever is next,” Benson said.
Hard work
Benson is a character, to say the least.
He greets people with a cheerful “howdy” and has befriended all of the stray cats on his street. With his dapper style and curly brown faux-hawk, Benson is an extrovert times five, bouncing from friend to friend and clique to clique.
“His personality is one of a kind,” Shoemaker said. “He is very outgoing, flamboyant, but still reserved.”
He also has a kind heart, Shoemaker said. He once told the salutatorian, No. 2 in the class, that she deserved the top spot because of how wonderful she is.
Despite the fun he had at school, it was not unusual, his mother Frances Dodson-Benson said, for Benson to stay up until midnight or later, surrounded on the living room floor by books and papers and binders. He would pore over test review booklets while others played video games.
“I call it intestinal fortitude,” Dodson-Benson said. “His biggest competitor is himself, because he just will not allow himself to do poorly. For him to have that sort of motivation at such a young age, you just don’t see that.”
He played bass clarinet, and after a year as a self-described “clumsy” prop holder for the band, he earned a spot on the marching team in 10th grade.
His teachers announced the group would be going to Disney World for several days the following spring to perform with other high schools from across the country and enjoy the theme park.
The trip was a first for Benson, who had never traveled outside of Texas.
The crash
Benson was thrown from his seat when the bus slammed into the ground.
It was pitch black until some of his classmates found their phones and flicked on the flashlight function. The light revealed students pinned under seats while others cried in agony and blood.
The bus landed on its side, so students who could move forced open a window and began to crawl out, hauling out classmates who could be moved. They searched for blankets to drape around themselves in the freezing night air, and passed around phones so students could wake their parents with the news.
Benson ended up at the Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola, Fla. He was one of two people who left the crash unscathed. Others had scratches and bruises and concussions. The more seriously injured suffered several broken bones, including one of his classmates who spent the next year in a wheelchair, and the band director, who stayed in a hospital states away for months as he healed.
Eventually, Benson and others flew from Florida back to Houston. It was his first time on a plane.
His mother, who had been awake for nearly 20 hours worrying, was shocked when he got home around midnight.
“He didn’t even have a hangnail,” she said. “I knew then, looking at him standing in this front door, I knew he was put here for something bigger.”
Moving forward
Benson ended up quitting band his junior year so he could focus on earning an associate’s degree through a dual-enrollment program at San Jacinto Community College. He made the dean’s list every semester but kept the honors from his mother, who had to find out through the mail. He spent two periods each day working at Channelview High’s counseling department and joined the National Honor Society and Rotary Interact and math club and the yearbook staff.
Even with stellar test scores, grades and a swelling resume, Benson was skeptical when he applied for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Scholarship. His dream was to go to the University of Texas-Austin, but with a modest settlement from the charter bus company and the uncertainty of scholarships, he prepared to go to a local school that he and his family could afford. He applied to UT on a whim.
Months ticked by without word, and even though he knew he made it to the Gates Foundation’s finalist phase, Benson did not expect much. On April 20, he got the email saying every expense related to his post-secondary education — rent, food, books, tuition, technology, lab fees, travel expenses — would be covered by the scholarship. He could get a bachelor’s, a master’s and a PhD if he wanted, all for free.
He did not tell his mother until the next day.
“I didn’t even know he applied for it,” Dodson-Benson said “I got chills. I just said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”
As of now, Benson will start as a freshman at UT on Aug. 26. He will be the first in his family to go to college and plans to major in computer science, hoping ultimately to work for a major tech company as a software developer.
His high school graduation has been pushed back to June 20, but he still will be able to walk across the stage in person. His valedictorian speech is due in a few days, but he still is thinking about what he wants to tell his classmates in Channelview and beyond.
“I just want to give the message that you are someone, you can determine your potential how far you can go,” Benson said. “The power always lies in your hands.”
“I think that there’s always some positive found to be in every negative. Even with coronavirus and Harvey — very, very traumatic events — we can always come up and be stronger and be ready for whatever is next.”
Dewayne Benson