After overcoming cancer, St. Jude survivor Holly inspires young minds in her classroom

Holly Bugos’ classroom makes you wish you were a fourth grader again. 
 

Warm colors and silly posters cover the walls, and lamps offer a break from the harsh overhead lights. You can sit at a desk if you want to be proper or you can flop down on a bean bag chair or bounce on a yoga ball.   

And you can stretch out, get comfortable and grab a good book — Holly has a bunch of them. She teaches literacy. She figures her students will keep reading if they’re laughing. So, she shares books that make her laugh. Collections of Shel Silverstein poems and the chapter book Sideways Stories From Wayside School. “That one is a favorite,” she said. “And if those are the kind of stories that got me into reading, that’s what I like to share with my kids. Maybe they’ll fall in love with reading.” 

Holly creates an escape from the outside world. In her classroom, it’s OK for little people to have big feelings. You can tell her you’re upset because you woke up late and your mom yelled at you. Or that you’re hungry because you forgot a snack.  

“This is our safe space,” Holly said. “Everybody has emotions here. We’re all going through different things, and it’s OK just to be. In this big, scary world, we all need a little grace and kindness.” 

Holly’s classroom isn’t just a place you get to go — it’s a place where you belong. That’s true for her students and for herself. She teaches at a small school in a small town in Arkansas. It’s the town she grew up in, and it’s the school she attended, from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade.  

Some of the parents of her students were her classmates. And some of her colleagues were her teachers. She likes how secure that feels. “Y’all made me who I am,” she tells them. “Now here I get to teach alongside of you.” 

Joey Carr was one of those teachers. He was Holly’s basketball coach, too. And by the time she grew up and became a teacher, he had become principal of her school. When they had an opening, the decision to hire Holly was “automatic,” he said. “I knew she had a compassionate heart.”  

He knew her character from seeing her in the classroom and on the court. He knew her strength from witnessing her beat cancer. 

Things were serious  

In 2002, when Holly was 12, a nagging pain crept into her left leg. At first, it didn’t raise alarms. But when she stopped climbing the bleachers for a good seat at her older sister’s basketball games, Holly’s mom knew something was wrong. 

What followed was a series of doctor’s appointments. Maybe it was a strained ligament. Pain medicine only made things worse. Then there were X-rays, and a trip to a specialist in Memphis.  

When Holly walked into the waiting room at that doctor’s office and saw her aunt from Virginia Beach, she knew things were serious. And when the doctor referred her to St. Jude, she knew that meant she had cancer. 

She couldn’t believe what was happening. She’d always felt like a typical kid, playing sports, running around with her friends in the neighborhood until the streetlights came on. Now her parents were driving her to a hospital. She imagined a dreary place with white walls and sad people. “I thought that was the end for me,” she said.  

Walking into St. Jude was overwhelming, but not in the way she thought it would be. “They're like, ‘Hello, welcome!’ And that first time, they just came right up to us, gathered us, took us in,” she said. 

She felt confused — her eyes weren’t seeing her expectations. “You don’t walk into a waiting room with those white walls. It’s just full of color.”  

She felt the first glimmers of hope. Maybe it wasn’t the end for her. “There are kids on tricycles and riding around in wagons. And they don’t have any hair, but they don’t look sick. Everybody’s happy.”  

The same day she arrived at St. Jude, Holly got a diagnosis: Ewing sarcoma, a cancerous tumor that starts in the bone. She also got a treatment plan: a year of chemotherapy plus two months of radiotherapy.  

Word spread in her hometown, and people jumped into action. Carr, who retired from the school in 2023 and now is a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives, organized “Hoops for Holly,” a free throw shoot-a-thon. The fire department sponsored a car wash with the local chapter of ESA, Epsilon Sigma Alpha, an international service organization that supports St. Jude. All of this support helps ensure that patients never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food.  

St. Jude community  

Holly’s family needed the extra support. Treatment was something they all experienced. It was happening to her body, but her whole family was affected. They lived an hour away from Memphis, so they decided to come home as often as possible. She’d spend five days at St. Jude getting chemotherapy, drive home for a week to recover. Return to St. Jude for three more days of chemo and home again for another week, and on and on.  

With each trip, her connection to the community at St. Jude bound itself a little tighter. Everyone she met offered grace and kindness. Cooks at Kay Kafe who made whatever she wanted when her appetite vanished. Nurses who helped with homework. Other patients who became her friends. They all understood what she was going through.  

Meanwhile, Holly’s friends at home were changing in ways she envied, taking up mascara wands and curling irons. “They were getting to go to dances, and they were getting to do their hair and makeup,” she said. “And even though I was trying to come back as much as I could, it was still just a whole other world.” 

Holly’s mom was in that other world with her, by her side every step of the way. She kept a journal of their time in treatment. Dozens and dozens of pages, marking the days with medical terminology and inner thoughts. And then in May of 2003, the final words: “We are done. We are free.”  

  For Holly, relief and happiness mixed with longing. 

“You’re so happy that you’ve beat cancer. But then you walk out, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. That was my family. That’s my second home,’” she said. “I love that place. I love those people. I don’t want to lose that.”  

But like Holly’s classroom, St. Jude is more than a place. It’s a feeling you carry with you, even after you leave. 

When Holly was finished with treatment, she returned to her hometown changed in a way that others could see. “Her struggle with cancer did not slow her down,” Carr said. “It was almost like it gave her more determination to live life to its fullest.”  

That’s still true today, over two decades after she completed treatment. 

Anyone who’s taught school will tell you it’s more than a full-time job. Holly also volunteers with the local ESA chapter that helped her family all those years ago. She even spent a term as president. She made sure all the events that supported St. Jude that year were big and successful, but she also wanted to support their local homeless shelter with time and donations. “I say that the community really poured into me,” she said. “And what ESA has allowed me to do is pour back into this community.”  

At school, Holly sometimes gets to step away from her day-to-day lessons to reflect on the lasting impact she can have. Recently, a couple of former students got in touch with her. They’d been in her classroom at a different school over 10 years ago, near the start of her career. They’re adults now, but they still think of her. One thanked her for bringing joy into the classroom at Christmas time. The other wanted to tell Holly that she’d just become a mother. 

“This is why I want to create that atmosphere with my students, because I want them to always know that they can come to me with happy or sad things,” she said. “I will always be here for them.”