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High-flying philanthropy

The man behind the Niswonger Foundation cuts an unprepossessing figure, but inside him there's a dynamo at work. Scott Niswonger is a flyer at heart, an aviator since his youth. If he shows flamboyance, it's with a purpose.

Case in point, as told by one of his friends: When Scott was in high school in Van Wert, Ohio, he asked his 16-year-old girlfriend for a date. Her dad said no, she was too young to go out with a young man in a car. Scott Niswonger showed up to take her for a spin an airplane. The father was so stunned or impressed that he let his daughter go for the plane ride. The girl is now Scott's wife Vikki. They drifted apart after high school, but got back together at a school reunion 20 years later and married.

In the meantime Niswonger went to Purdue University, earned a degree in aviation technology and airline management, took a job as a company pilot for Magnavox Corp., and moved with the company to Greeneville.

"In the early '70s I made my first trip to Greeneville for Magnavox, which had a plant here," he says. ÌI went home and told my family about the friendliness and sincerity of the people I met here. The opportunity came up within a few months to move here with Magnavox, and I jumped at it."

Niswonger started a small charter flying business in Greeneville on the side, with Magnanox' permission, and ran it from 1973 to 1980. Air cargo deregulation, combined with deregulation of the trucking industry, gave impetus to an idea he had to form an airport-to-airport trucking business. When that business, known as Landair, appeared ready to take off, he quit company flying and went into it full-bore.

He formed Forward Air on another freight-forwarding concept in 1990. The companies were taken public in the mid 1990s, and he retained big blocks of stock. With fleets of trucks and with terminals scattered nationwide, the companies are still growing, and Forward Air was just named one of the 100 best-run companies in the nation by Forbes.

Niswonger has a two-page list of community involvement activities and items of special recognition, including service on the governor of Tennessee's Board for Economic Growth and being named the distinguished graduate of the year, worldwide, by Junior Achievement. He's especially proud of the latter, crediting the organization for business lessons he learned in high school.

His philanthropy, besides the Niswonger Foundation, includes more than $25 million in projects at Tusculum College, where he earned a B.S. in business administration after moving to Greeneville. His money has built a student center, an indoor soccer hall, a complete renovation of the football stadium, and a library addition. A baseball stadium is on the way.

Niswonger has also made significant stock gifts to the East Tennessee Foundation and contributed to the causes of other higher learning institutions, including UT and ETSU.

Tom Garland, Tusculum's board chairman, says, "The impact that Scott has had on this whole region is fantastic, and the [Niswonger] foundation is going to have an inestimable positive impact on individual communities around here."

If Niswonger's generosity is offset by a strain of self-indulgence, it would be in his company aircraft, a Gulfstream 4 twin-engine jet used by company pilots and himself. A multi-million-dollar craft, lavishly appointed, it's based in Greeneville but could reach Paris from there. Even with such tastes in flying, he poses an unassuming image, wearing off-the-rack suits and appearing for all the world to be exactly what he is, a product of Ohio farm country.

When he was asked by his foundation's executive director, Oliver Thomas, why he was going to lunch at a Greeneville area elementary school at the invitation of a student shortly after last Christmas, Niswonger told Thomas it was because the student had sent him a thank-you note for an "Angel Tree" gift of a winter coat. Thomas says he asked how many names he'd picked for a gift from the Angel Tree. Niswonger's answer was about 120.

"That told me a lot about what kind of a man he is," says Thomas.

—B. H.

A fledgling foundation gives millions to some of East Tennessee's poorest schools

by Barry Henderson

It's the end of the school day at Grassy Fork Elementary School, the heart and soul of this remote Cocke County community. It's a tiny hamlet tucked between towering ridges and splayed, helter-skelter, along the banks of the small, surging creek that gave it its name.

Tina Cardenas, who teaches third and fourth grades, is huddled over a computer, readying tomorrow's lesson plans. Students bustle around the classroom, which is cluttered, and charmingly so, with the kids' art work, little science projects, and papers marked with all manner of math problems and complete and incomplete sentences. Coats are going on, chatter is everywhere, and so are smiles and laughter.

Shannon Grooms, principal of Grassy Fork, with its kindergarten-through-8th-grade charge, is showing off the morale of his school's teachers, pupils, and parents, some of whom are chatting amiably in the hallways. He is a second-year principal and winner of the Cocke County principal of the year honor in his first year. He brags of what he calls "total community support" for education. "They don't just want a good education here. They won't settle for that. They want it to be better, a lot better, than that," Grooms says.

He is speaking of a school that, only a few years ago, was going to be closed, until the community rose up to protect it. He doesn't have a PTA. What he has is the Grassy Fork Community Club, an organization that meets next door at the firehall. Grooms says the membership is a good part of what energizes his school and adds that he has the backing of the county's educational establishment. But the thing that makes Grooms' school even more unusual is that it is armed for the next three years with a grant and additional school management assistance from the Niswonger Foundation, which is making his school a demonstration project and a model for rural elementary education.

"It's sparked morale, given a boost to our teachers and our whole community," Grooms says of the grant. "The students, staff, and parents are all working hard. You don't know what that means to a principal."

The Niswonger Foundation, well on its way to becoming East Tennessee's largest individually sponsored foundation, has $20 million in corporate stock in its endowment today. Scott Niswonger plans to double that amount in 2003 and reach as much as $100 million in the next five to six years. The stock is in Greeneville-based Landair and Forward Air, trucking and freight-forwarding companies with combined annual revenues of about $375 million that Niswonger founded and continues to serve as chairman, CEO, and major stockholder.

All of the foundation's money is targeted toward education for East Tennesseans—not those in urban, well-heeled districts but those in rural settings. Besides the school partnerships, the foundation identifies students willing to return to their communities in the future and provides them with college scholarships.

How the foundation is going about those processes forms a nearly unique model of its own. Rather than offering grants to be used for general educational purposes, the Niswonger approach has been to create an "operating foundation." It supplies both money and expert support to school districts that demonstrate specific needs. The focus has been directed toward total community improvement through education, and the schools themselves have been asked what kind of help they want. The foundation helps design programs to fit those desires and hires people with expertise or gets volunteers from other school districts to advise the schools on implementation. If it sounds simple, it's because the foundation's board and small staff are committed to keeping it as simple to operate as possible.

The first half-dozen communities reached by the foundation, which expects to distribute about $2 million this year, represent schools that fall mostly below the state's average in per-pupil expenditures in areas where local revenue bases are static or falling.

The foundation comes on line at a time when the state, which at last survey ranked 49th in the nation in per-pupil spending on public education, has had its own budget stretched beyond its limits. The Upper East Tennessee counties involved in the first round of foundation participation are characterized by employment opportunities falling markedly through the 1990s. Agricultural work has dropped off as tobacco, the area's principal cash crop, has gone out of favor. Low-end manufacturing jobs have left for other countries with lower wage profiles. Service-industry and tourism growth has been spotty, and the outlook for better jobs has been poor.

"Education comes first," Niswonger says, "if this region is going to get to the technological frontier that provides for the 21st-century jobs that are needed here."

A small-town Ohioan who adopted Greeneville and its environs 30 years ago as his home—and his mission—Niswonger and his companies have prospered there since he formed them over the last three decades. His philosophy for using his rewards is based on the principle: "He who dies rich is a fool."

Oliver Thomas, an attorney, former minister, and former chairman of the Maryville city school board, was Niswonger's choice to head up the foundation as executive director. Thomas has one administrative assistant, only recently appointed. The board of directors is composed of Niswonger, his wife Nikki, and his long-time attorney Richard Roberts. Tom Garland, the former state Senate minority leader and chancellor of the state Board of Regents, is the foundation's advisor. Garland has also just begun a second term as chairman of the board of trustees of Tusculum College. He and the foundation have their offices in a former home at the edge of Tusculum's campus. The foundation is a tight-knit little family with few administrative expenses. And what Scott Niswonger says goes.

"You can't imagine what a great feeling it is to know that, if I recommend we spend money on this project or that student, I only have to go to one person, who I'm confident is going to say, 'Go ahead.' There aren't many foundations like that," says Thomas, who says working with poor, rural schools has been a lifelong dream. "And to have someone of Tom Garland's experience, standing, and political and educational connections to go to for advice and counsel is just exceptional," he says.

Where the foundation's resources have been applied already represents a broad mix. "I wanted these kids to have the 'extras' that I think are essential," says Niswonger, "in instrumental music, in vocational training, in foreign languages..."

And that, by and large, is where the first round of grants and support is going. Here's an early accounting, based on programs in place for this school year and commitments for the next several years:

The Partnerships

Carter County: A district with per-pupil funding below the state average, Carter County was wondering how it was going to get its four high schools equipped with up-to-date computer technology.

The foundation's answer, tailored specifically to schools with limited available space, was to create four mobile labs, each equipped with 30 laptops, which can be moved from classroom to classroom on carts as needed. Hardware, software, and training for faculty utilization were included in a two-year project that is being put into place now. The Greeneville city schools' experienced and successful technology director was retained to assist Carter County with the installation and training, and the schools were wired at foundation expense to accept the labs at each classroom site.

"It means a great deal to us," says Carter schools Superintendent Dallas Williams. "We wouldn't have been able to afford to do anything like that anytime soon, with the cutbacks we've had in the last couple of years. We're tickled to death with it."

Cost to foundation: $346,000 over two years

Johnson County: Surrounding the isolated community of Mountain City and tucked in the farthest eastern corner of the state, Johnson County asked for assistance of a non-academic, lower-tech sort.

"When he [Thomas] came here and asked us what we really needed," says Johnson schools' Superintendent Minnie Miller, "I remember our board chairman, Dick Grayson, who was just last week elected county executive, told him what we'd like is a better vocational program in residential construction—training carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and especially brickmasons."

The fact of the matter, Thomas was told, was that no amount of academic training would help get young people jobs in any significant numbers in the county. The demand for new residences, especially for retirees moving into the county in a spillover from nearby North Carolina, was at an all-time high. There were few skilled tradesmen to do the construction work.

"We were heavily dependent on the textile industry," Miller says, adding that all but one of the several textile mills in the county has moved away, leaving little in the way of employment opportunities locally, except in the building trades.

The foundation provided the materials and equipment to establish a new masonry shop adjacent to the high school's vocational area and hired a licensed contractor/instructor, doubling the school's construction-vocational instruction component. General Shale Products Corp. is contributing the necessary blocks and brick at no charge, Miller says. The construction students, about 44 in all, are building the shop, with help from their teachers and from architects and engineers who are contributing their time and interacting with the students at minimal compensation. The county is in the process of buying a 45-acre tract in Mountain City, where a subdivision is planned, with the first house to be built by next year's residential construction students.

"We hope to be self-sustaining, through the sales of these houses, in the next three to four years," Miller says.

Cost to foundation: $250,000 over three years

Greene County: In Greene County schools—a district funded at only 85 percent of state average—no instrumental music was taught, despite the county's position surrounding Greeneville, which has one of the state's most widely recognized music programs.

The foundation is helping put instrumental music in the curriculum of both middle schools and two high schools. It's building band rooms on two school campuses, providing music instructors and many of the needed instruments, and has retained the Greeneville band director to coordinate the new program.

The reasoning behind the inauguration of instrumental music in the county is both basic and complex. "All the research has shown that learning instrumental music stimulates vital connectivity between the right brain and left brain," says Thomas, himself a banjo picker and an erstwhile advocate of expanded music programs in Maryville's schools. That's the complex part. The basics say that learning an instrument makes clearer thinking easier.

Cost to the foundation: $1.15 million over three years

Greeneville City: The city schools in Greeneville, though respected and relatively well funded, were strapped to expand a Spanish language program that was paid for last year by a federal grant to one elementary school.

"It was so popular among our teachers, students, and parents," says Lyle Ailshie, the Greeneville schools' superintendent, that they all wanted it.

"Thank goodness for the foundation," Ailshie says, describing a series of grants that has been used to extend the Spanish classes to another elementary school in the system this year and all four by next year, paying for instructors and materials. "It would have taken many years for us to have done it on our own," he says.

When it reaches all Greeneville K-5 students, each student in the system will have Spanish lessons available from K-12. It was envisioned as both a response to the area's growing Hispanic population and to the need to begin second-language instruction at the earliest possible age.

Cost to the foundation: $225,000 over three years

Unicoi County: The Unicoi County schools wanted a comprehensive performance audit to see what they needed and where. The foundation staff conducted the audit and offered 22 recommendations for improvement, 14 of which required no expenditure of school funds.

Items paid for by the foundation have included some computer hardware and software to fill gaps in the system. The foundation also paid for a planning retreat for the schools' senior staff and trips for teams of teachers from each of the district's six schools to other schools to view what are considered "best practices" in the field. Those visits allow the teachers to establish bench marks to improve both their teaching methods and the learning results.

Cost to the foundation: about $35,000

Cocke County: The district wanted help for one of its poorest schools, Grassy Fork Elementary. The district is so poor that federal free or reduced-price lunches were offered to the whole school population. The foundation saw a chance to help establish a rural school that other educators in the region will try to emulate.

Foundation assistance for the Cocke County school is coming in two phases. In the first, writing workshops for faculty and staff training in the use of computer software will be combined to enhance language arts instruction and the development of kids' writing skills. In the second, emphasis will be put on math and science, including the creation of science labs and the implementation of interactive learning strategies.

Linda Irwin, principal of Maryville's Sam Houston Elementary and one of the state's most recognized elementary school principals, is serving as mentor/advisor. "I can pick up the phone and have access to her any time. She's been a tremendous help in our planning," says Shannon Grooms, Grassy Fork's young and enthusiastic principal.

Cost to the foundation: $108,000 over three years

Hancock County: The next school system on the foundation's agenda is Hancock County, one of the state's poorest. Despite its economic limitations, Hancock actually spends more money per pupil than the state average, a fact that has caught Thomas' eye. "It shows how much dedication there is there for education," says Thomas, who has been discussing potential assistance with the county's school officials and expects to have a program outlined soon.

The Scholarships

Niswonger Foundation Scholarships reward young scholars who show potential for leadership and are willing to commit to return to their home communities when they finish college. In other words, it's not just grades and ambition.

"Which is more important, the class valedictorian or the girl who wants to come back home to practice medicine in her county?" asks Scott Niswonger, adding his own answer: "It's hard to say." Then he reflects on the former student and the ringing recommendations that are likely to come from his or her school. "Not everyone's going to be an English teacher," he says.

What he wants from the foundation's scholarship program is to ensure that the latter, who may be an average student in high school, gets her wish if she sincerely wants it and can qualify for entrance into college.

The program has four full-scholarship and three partial-scholarship students enrolled this fall, two of them in Atlanta's prestigious and expensive Emory University. The scholarship contract includes a promise to return to work in the home community in the future, one year for each year of schooling, or the scholarship may revert to a loan.

"One of the things we've learned is how cooperative colleges and universities have been once they find out what our mission is," says Niswonger, who says tuition discounts and other assistance have been negotiated, which will allow the scholarship fund to reach more scholars.

Thomas is very high on the concept of paying for the higher education of young people who want to bring their education back to East Tennessee.

"We have a young woman at ETSU who wants to come back home to Cocke County as a rural nurse practitioner," he says. "I've got a kid here (at Tusculum College) who wants to go back and teach history at Carter County High School. "I want to send him to London or to Germany to get his master's degree, if that's what he wants, so he'll be able to bring a perspective back to Elizabethton that's wider than the one he's gaining at Tusculum. Tusculum's a great school, but it's here, almost where he grew up," Thomas says.

"We want kids who want to give back," he says, "but not necessarily right back. We want well-rounded kids who have some experience, kids who've up to now been taught that they have to leave to have a rewarding career but who can see that that is not the case."

The scholarship program, Thomas says, should expand to about 12 students next year, then grow to level off at about 40, with about 10 graduating each year. The scholars must attend a leadership training institute at Tusculum each May, after classes end for the summer. The foundation has obtained the services of Leonard Bradley, a political science professor at Vanderbilt and advisor to several Tennessee governors, to lead the institute, which is designed to help prepare the scholars for public service. He also asks them to keep a journal of their college experiences for him to read periodically.

"This is all possible because of Scott Niswonger, who saw educational barriers in this region as economic barriers, Thomas says. "He's putting his resources to work breaking down some of those barriers.

"They're as old as the mountains around here and are almost linked to geography—living in a 'holler' puts limits on horizons," Thomas says. "We want to open those horizons. We want the kids from the 'holler' to see that they can make a difference, right where they live."
 

November 14, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 46
© 2002 Metro Pulse