Sumner Grant continues to give students a chance at higher education

WEBSTER COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – For parents, helping pay for a college degree can be challenging.

Usually, the cheapest route is the most appealing one.

For the graduating seniors in five Mississippi counties, that financial burden is something parents won’t have to worry about.

Those five counties are Attala, Carroll, Choctaw, Montgomery, and Webster counties.

Tuition to certain in-state schools is almost all but paid for, thanks to one man’s determination in the 70s, E.H. Sumner.

His grand-nephew Harry Sumner tells the story of how it all started: “He had a worker who was making a good wage with him and came to him at the end of the summer and said ‘Mr. Sumner, I’m not going back to school.’ He said ‘Why?’ ‘Well, because I’m making too much money with you.’ He said, ‘You’re fired; go to school.’ I think he paid for his school, and that kind of perpetuated the whole deal.”

More than forty years later, thousands owe their chance at higher education to E.H. Sumner and his fund, the Sumner Grant.

“It’s very inspiring to see what he’s done,” Harry said. “Again, we were going over the numbers earlier, and it’s given away over $110 million.”

Harry says his uncle and aunt put the family’s 19,000 acres of timber land in a trust back in 1977.

That land was spread across the five counties the grant now supports.

Harry listed, “Montgomery, Carroll, Choctaw, Attala, and Webster, that’s where they owned land.”

In those five counties everyone knows about the Sumner Grant.

“It gives them reassurance that if they want to attend college that just a financial burden alone will not hold them back,” said Webster County School’s Director of Federal Programs, Sue Anne Boatman.

Boatman doesn’t speak on this from an observer’s standpoint.

She’s a 1994 graduate of Eupora High School and received the Sumner Grant to attend Mississippi State the following year.

“I was relieved,” she said, “because it also gave me money to help maybe assist with books and other costs that normally would’ve been out-of-pocket-expense.”

Because she came back to Eupora, Boatman’s daughter, now a senior at Eupora, will receive the same Grant, along with every other senior from the five counties who apply to Ole Miss, Holmes, Millsaps, UMMC, or Mississippi State.

With the rate the fund grows every year, Sumner says students will continue to attend these schools with a financial burden lifted.

The grand-nephew said, “As long as the markets continue to do what they should do, it’ll be forever.”

The fund is only used for Fall and Spring Semesters.

Being the grant’s lawyer, Sumner is also the one who receives the applications, and he says every year he receives thousands, thousands getting the chance at a better education.