2025 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 9-11, 2025 • Pittsburgh, PA
DAVID L. LAWRENCE CONVENTION CENTER
Award Winner/Nominee Details 2025
Jessica Bergeron
Jessica Bergeron is the ultimate problem solver, and she has tirelessly devoted her career to improving outcomes for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Jessica’s specialty is getting programs off the ground, assembling the right team, and creating structure. She is a rarity that can generate brilliant ideas and move from ideation to implementation, always focusing on measuring impact.
She was a founding member of the Georgia Pathway for Language and Literacy, which gathered stakeholders throughout the state to agree that: 1) children who are DHH can do anything, 2) current literacy rates were unacceptable, and 3) DHH communities must put aside differences about communication modalities and rally behind the common goal of age-appropriate literacy outcomes for DHH children.
With 159 counties, 50 percent rural, Georgia has a varied population of DHH children to reach, requiring creativity and innovation. As part of Pathway, Jessica advocated for expansion into early hearing detection and intervention, which she dubbed “the golden ticket� for any DHH child. She emphasized that we had to start sooner to get the school-aged literacy outcomes we wanted in Georgia. In 2019 she established the Georgia Mobile Audiology (GMA) program, convinced the governor to fund it, and then spearheaded the initiative.
Perhaps Jessica’s biggest passion is ensuring that the “golden ticket� is available to ALL children regardless of geographic location and including marginalized families. She often says we must develop programs by consistently “leading from the vulnerable.� She implemented a parent navigation program in South Georgia to ensure these families had a warm hand to hold as they navigated the problematic testing and early intervention enrollment process. This program has grown from 1 to 5 parent navigators over the past few years.
Through her work with GMA, she learned that newborn hearing screenings were not being conducted on weekends in many areas and that training was desperately needed in birthing hospitals. This led her to establish a contract between the Departments of Public Health and Education requiring data sharing—something that had never been done before.
Her innovative spirit was best displayed during the challenges of the COVID epidemic. Babies received diagnoses in public libraries, the back seats of cars, and the comfort of their strollers. Jessica brought the services to the family and figured out how to do it for free, blasting through financial and insurance barriers. If a family was struggling, she advised her staff to “figure it out� and fight to break down barriers. And figure it out, they did! Once, an audiologist recovering from surgery completed an ABR from her bed in Atlanta while a parent navigator positioned probes in a baby's ear in South Georgia.
Literacy rates in Georgia have doubled since her time with the Pathway Coalition. In partnership with the Georgia EHDI program, GMA has seen almost 1,000 children and performed over 500 diagnostic tests and over 300 screenings. Tele and mobile audiology diagnostics have quadrupled since 2021. Most of these children would not have received a timely diagnosis evaluation without the availability of services provided by GMA.