ICC to Honor Summerford

Marilyn Sumerford of Smithville will be honored as Itawamba Community College’s 2013 Alumnus of the Year, Sept. 28, during homecoming activities on the Fulton Campus.

Special presentations will be made at 1:15 p.m. in the lobby of the David C. Cole Student Services building and at 3:40 p.m. during a pre-game ceremony at Eaton Field, prior to the football game with the Northwest Rangers.

A graduate of ICC, Sumerford was appointed to its Board of Trustees in 1988, and in 1998, she became the College’s first female board chair. When she was a student at ICC, her activities and honors included cheerleader (two years), Hall of Fame, Who’s Who in American Junior Colleges, Mirror co-editor and Phi Theta Kappa.

She earned both the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Mississippi University for Women.

For the past 34 years, she has worked in the healthcare field, and since 1995, she has served as executive director of Access Family Health Services. Prior to that, she was employed by Gilmore Memorial Hospital in Amory as director of Dietary Services and Chief Clinical Dietitian. She also worked as a nursing home consultant with Southern Health Enterprises at Red Bay Nursing Home.

Sumerford has held various leadership roles within the Mississippi Primary Health Care Association including president from 2004-06, secretary and member-at-large and in 2001 and 2011, she was named that group’s Executive Director of the Year. She has served as a presenter for the National Association of Community Health Centers at the Policy and Issues Forum, Community Health Institute and on national webinars related to health services for veterans and emergency preparedness. In addition, she has held offices in the Mississippi Dietetics Association and served as president of the Northeast Mississippi Dietetics Association.

Sumerford also has served on numerous community boards including the United Way, Sanctuary Hospice House, Head Start and Salvation Army as well as co-chair of the hospitality committee for Stars over Mississippi/Entertainment for Education from 1993-2005. For more than 30 years she has been a Sunday school teacher and youth leader in her church.

For 35 years, she has been married to Kenny Sumerford. They are the parents of Ben, a family nurse practitioner in Tupelo; Will, a chemical engineer; and Bethany, a registered nurse currently in the family nurse practitioner master’s program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, all of whom graduated from ICC.