By Delayna Earley
The Island News
A former Beaufort County English teacher recently competed in the 2024 Ms. USA Petite Pageant in Chicago at the end of July while advocating for her platform supporting women who are healing from abusive relationships.
Kristen Smith moved to Beaufort County in 2018 and spent several years teaching at Battery Creek High School.
Originally from Mississippi, Smith and her family had to leave their home and relocated to Tennessee after they were displaced during Hurricane Katrina. Even though she calls Beaufort County her home now, Smith represented her home state of Mississippi in the Ms. USA Petite Pageant.
Smith said that it has always been a dream of hers to go back and help the community that she grew up in and through the Ms. USA Petite Pageant she said that she has had the opportunity to go back and help the community.
While participating in the pageant, Smith’s platform was Heal, Sis!, an organization that Smith began after she left what she says was a 10-year-long abusive marriage, leaving her to rebuild her life.
She said that the experiences that she had after leaving her marriage and the way that the community banded together around her help lead her to do the same for more than 900 women globally through the Heal, Sis! Online network.
Participating in pageants throughout her teens, this is her first pageant as a mature woman.
She said that she did not even think she had a chance to be selected because usually women do not get to participate after marriage.
“While I was there, I placed top 10 and I also brought home the Ms. Congeniality Award,” Smith said.
She advocated for her site and even chose her pageant dresses to reflect her message.
“The purple and pink dress is the colors of Heal, Sis! but the pattern also represents the scars that make us beautiful, and I really wanted to make it a testimony of healing for myself because when I was leaving my ex-husband I literally had to run out of my house with the clothes on my back and ran straight to my school, Battery Creek High School,” said Smith. “The way that Beaufort just wrapped their arms around me, especially the Sheriff’s Department, my coworkers and the families that I got to work with at Battery Creek – this was a testimony.”
Smith retired from her position teaching English for Beaufort County in May 2023 so that she could focus on the Heal, Sis! platform.
“Even though I left Mississippi as a broke teenager, this experience has allowed me to return as a queen, and I never imagined that this would have been possible,” said Smith.
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
