Community Foundation of the Ozarks

The CFO’s fall newsletter is out, and features the Norton family’s story of loss and survival in the Joplin tornado. A scholarship fund has been established in memory of Will Norton, a member of the Joplin Class of 2011 graduating on that May day.

“He was just gone”

The Tornado’s Wrath Claimed Will Norton, But His Legacy Survives

As Mark Norton lay broken in a crowded, chaotic operating room, Dr. Rex Peterson leaned in close to tell him the morphine supply was depleted and he was going to experience more pain than he’d ever known as the surgeon prepared to re-set the bones protruding from his left leg.

But it hardly compared to the even more exquisite pain a week later when Pastor Aaron Brown had to lean in again at Mark’s hospital bedside in the pre-dawn hours to tell him his son Will’s body had been positively identified after a frantic week of friends, family, strangers and search teams looking for the popular Joplin teenager who vanished into the twister.

An aspiring director whose career was kickstarted with more than 2 million views of his prolific YouTube videos, Will Norton was headed to a prestigious film program at Chapman University near Disneyland. He’d traveled to 34 states and 15 countries, and was learning to fly. His tennis team went to state finals and he went to leadership programs like Boy’s State; he was just at one in Washington, D.C., when Bin Laden was killed and he joined the throngs outside of the White House.

“He was always just a great kid to be around. He made good choices, he never gave us a moment’s worry,” Mark says. “He was a good student. He volunteered his time. He made friends easily because he was real considerate.”

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We join with the many friends and colleagues who are mourning the loss of Mel Saunders, a CFO board member who died Saturday as a result of injuries he received in a two-vehicle crash near Evansville, Ind., last week.

A financial advisor for Wells Fargo Advisors LLC, Mel had served on the CFO Board of Directors since June 2006. He also served as chair of our Scholarship Committee, which selected the recipients of the scholarship funds administered by the CFO.

Mel was just 35 and he and his wife, Theresa, had a two-year-old son, Tyson. He was involved in a number of community organizations, in addition to ours, including the Boys & Girls Club, Sertoma, and the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce. We last saw Mel at the Chamber’s annual membership luncheon last Wednesday, greeting friends as usual with his big, wide smile.

Visitation for Mel Saunders will take place from 1-6 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 6, at Gorman-Scharpf Funeral Home, and again from 2-3 p.m., Sunday, Aug. 7, at the James River Assembly of God Realife Center in Ozark. His service will take place at 3 p.m., Sunday, at the James River Realife Center.

The Rural Schools Partnership, a program to develop resources and assets for southern Missouri schools, is the model for the Rural School and Community Trust’s new Center for Midwestern Initiatives to expand the concepts across a broader region of the country.

Gary Funk

Former Community Foundation of the Ozarks President Gary Funk will head the Center for Midwestern Initiatives for the RSCT. The CFO created the Rural Schools Partnership in 2009.

The common goal of both efforts is to promote place-based education, which encourages  connections between rural schools and the communities they anchor by instilling a commitment to their culture and heritage among students and educators.

Since its founding, the Rural Schools Partnership has created a network of more than 100 rural schools in southern Missouri, developed more than $4 million in charitable assets to support rural   education, and built the Ozarks Teacher Corps, a scholarship program to return teacher-education graduates to rural communities.

The Rural School and Community Trust is a founding partner of the RSP project. Its Center for Midwestern Initiatives program will work to replicate the program in a region that will initially include Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and South Dakota, all of which have strong rural-education networks.

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