Jana Bearden, M.S., LPC, Beverly Ross, M.A., LPC-S, and Devon McCain, M.A., LPC of Jenny’s Hope in Grief For Schools are helping schools deal with loss. AUSTIN JACKSON | WCMESSENGER
It starts with a call. A student was killed.
A cloud of pain and disbelief has started to settle over an entire school community, as students learn they won’t see their friend again on Monday.
When Jenny’s Hope in Grief for Schools gets that call, three women clear their calendars of paying clients and go to work.
They are there to meet confused, distraught faces and to shoulder one impossible task so that educators — many of whom are grieving themselves in close-knit communities — don’t have to do it alone.
On that first day back at school, after the carpool line thins and classroom doors close, Beverly Ross, Jana Bearden and Devon McCain take a deep breath and step into rooms filled with students and staff searching for answers. They begin with a simple, disarming question.
“Can you tell me about your friend?”
For their work supporting and educating local school districts through tragedy, Ross, Bearden and McCain — the team behind Jenny’s Hope in Grief for Schools — are the Wise County Messenger’s People of the Year.
One therapeutic tool in grief counseling is using creative outlets like drawing. Pictured are paper bags decorated by clients grieving loved ones. AUSTIN JACKSON | WCMESSENGER
Grief counseling became a calling for Ross long before this nonprofit.
Her daughter, Jenny Bizaillion, died in 2010 at age 31 of Group A strep bacteria just weeks after she entered the hospital with what was initially believed to be the flu.
Ross was left walking the path she now helps others navigate — learning how to hold on to love and joy for someone who is gone while adjusting to a life that is no longer the same.
As the founder and executive director of Wise County Christian Counseling, Ross spent years studying grief from multiple perspectives, professionally and personally. She was particularly struck by how differently people experience loss — especially children.
Watching her granddaughter grieve the loss of her mother deepened that understanding.
Eight years later, Ross opened Jenny’s Hope, a nonprofit grief counseling center housed within Wise County Christian Counseling in Decatur, focused on helping families walking similar journeys.
Inside the counseling center are well-worn rooms decorated for different age groups, spaces that have helped both adults and children process the deaths of loved ones. For a time, that was where the work stayed.
Then Wise County changed.
In 2022, five Wise County students died unexpectedly over a four-month span.
Two of those deaths struck Paradise Elementary, where first-grader Athena Strand and second-grader Kennedy Marie Handley — both 7 — were killed in separate tragedies.
Bearden remembers those days as a blur. At that point, the team had not yet developed a clear framework for responding to student grief at a campuswide level.
What followed became an education in real time.
Sometimes their work meant sitting quietly, practicing breathing with students and reminding them to drink water. Other times it meant talking about the “special person” they missed or creating a comforting space to share painful emotions.
Each tragedy added another layer of understanding.
With every campus visit, the team learned what worked — and what didn’t — for different age groups, different schools and different kinds of loss. Elementary students often needed permission to play. Teenagers needed honesty. Teachers needed space to grieve, too. Creative outlets such as drawing and writing proved to be powerful tools.
Slowly, a process began to take shape.
In 2024, they returned to Paradise again, this time after school board member Dr. Heath Smith and two of his sons, Wyatt, 8, and Noah, 6, died in a plane crash. By then, the work was informed by experience.
Ross, Bearden and McCain began organizing their notes, instincts and hard-earned lessons into something more durable — a school-based grief response model.
That model was tested again this year in Decatur ISD, when siblings Sophia Christensen and Nolan Christensen were killed in a wreck. In November, the district mourned Treb McKinnon, who attended McCarroll Middle School with Nolan.
McCain and Ross both came from education backgrounds, beginning their careers as teachers and school counselors before entering private practice and nonprofit work. Bearden has a background in the church. All three have also lost loved ones — experiences that allow them to meet students with empathy rather than distance.
Bearden said sharing parts of her own story has helped students open up, and over time, some have stayed in touch.
“My dad died, and then Sophia and Nolan died in June,” she said. “So while working with that teen group, I shared that I was walking my own grief journey this summer. On Christmas, a teen texted me and said, ‘I’m praying for you and your family. I’m thinking about you.’”
Those moments, Bearden said, are among many affirmations that the team is on the right track.
By the time Jenny’s Hope in Grief for Schools was formally established this year, the team had already walked into multiple Wise County campuses during their hardest days. The counselors have also worked in Springtown and Cisco, with word spreading through education circles.
The nonprofit offers a structured, step-by-step curriculum designed to help schools prepare for — and respond to — the loss of a student or staff member. It addresses everything from the first hours after the news breaks to the first day back on campus and the difficult days that follow. The materials include guidance for administrative conversations, suggested language and practical tools aimed at reducing confusion when emotions are raw.
“Early on, we recognized that we need to bring calm to chaos,” Bearden said. “That’s basically how we came up with the curriculum.”
In 2026, the team hopes to place the curriculum in the hands of more educators after presenting to the National Alliance for Grieving Children. Their goal is to expand access to tools that can help schools even when counselors cannot be present in person.
Each campus visit after a student’s death has underscored the complexity of grief and added to the living document of their work.
Bearden recalled one elementary student who quietly joined her to play Uno in a comfort room the team had set up on campus.
“He told me, ‘I’m really sad because my mom and dad are at court today deciding who’s going to have custody of me,’” Bearden said.
Artwork for loved ones at Wise County Christian Counseling, the home of Jenny’s Hope in Grief for Schools. AUSTIN JACKSON | WCMESSENGER
Death is not the only thing that causes grief, Ross added, and tragedies often bring unresolved trauma to the surface.
Whether students come to talk about a friend they lost or something happening at home, Ross said the team is willing to meet them where they are.
It comes from a place deeper than professional duty, she said. And the next time a Wise County’s school calls, Ross said they will be there to help
“There is such a burning desire in me to be with grieving people because I know it, and grieving people don’t scare me,” Ross said. “I’m OK staying with them, walking with them, even if it’s in silence, and being curious. I feel like it’s a calling.”
“I do not believe Jenny died so I could do this work,” she added. “But since she died, I’m going to do this work. I know what it feels like to walk out of the hospital without your person. I know what it feels like to say, ‘I don’t want this chapter in my life.’ And you do it anyway. You don’t have a choice. And so if I have to do this, I want to do it beside other people.”
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