The family of St. Francis Central Catholic School has a binder full of love for Adrianna Chico Evans, a beloved teacher who was lost to the pandemic last fall.
A really big binder.
Principal Arthur Moore smiled as he hefted it onto a conference table in his office at the school on Guthrie Lane.
“And we’re just getting started,” he said. “Tonight, we turn the page to a new chapter.”
Evans, who taught third grade, died last October of COVID and its complications, just three weeks after her son, Luke, was born by emergency Caesarian section. She was 29.
It was a race to save the baby and her, said Zach Evans, her husband and Luke’s father.
“Adrianna didn’t give up — she gave out,” he said.
“She had such a love for this school. This is why we’re doing this.”
Both he and the principal are referring to an inaugural gathering happening tonight at the school.
The Adrianna Chico Evans Family Fund will celebrate the legacy of its namesake with a cash award of $2,500 to a St. Francis teacher who best exemplifies the mission of education and service, both in the classroom and community.
A reception will be at 6 p.m., with the ceremony commencing an hour later.
“Commencement” is the watchword, said Evans’ father Bob Chico, who has big goals for the fund.
The idea is to perpetuate the fund, he said. The idea is to keep it going, forever.
And not just at St. Francis Central.
“We want to eventually branch out,” he said.
“We want to do all Catholic schools in West Virginia. We want to do every school in West Virginia. And we want to go outside of West Virginia to surrounding states. We want everybody to learn and benefit from my daughter’s legacy.”
Which, in part, is why that binder on Moore’s conference table is so heaping.
There are nomination forms, and biographical material and bylaws for the nonprofit foundation.
There are all those paperwork particulars, Moore said, that are just part of the deal.
“It looks like work,” Moore said, but it isn’t.
“Over there is work,” he said, gesturing at his desk and its mountain range of paper. “This is love.”
Love entered in because Zach Evans hated the idea of taking the money from a GoFundMe that people set up while his wife was losing her breath and his son was fighting for his.
After huddling with his father-in-law, the idea for the foundation was given loft.
Those initial GoFundMe contributions got the mission going.
“And now here we are, seven months later,” Bob Chico said earlier this week in Moore’s office with that big binder in front of him.
Most days now, he can talk about his daughter without blinking tears — but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier.
Luke makes it easier, he said.
The strapping 7-month-old is developmentally sound, hitting all those pediatric benchmarks while charming everyone he meets with a winning smile that looks a lot like Adrianna’s, his grandfather proudly notes.
Chico in the meantime is proud of the idea of a cash award — no stipulations on how to spend it — going to a hard-working teacher, just as his daughter was.
“Take your family on a vacation,” he said.
And he’s proud the foundation is going to build up teachers who took to the profession as a calling, just as his daughter did.
“Sometimes, we forget who the true heroes are.”
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