Twelve Roads Forward: Meet the 2026–27 Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarship recipients

Twelve Roads Forward: Meet the 2026–27 Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarship recipients

Every Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarship begins with a loss no family should have to carry. A parent or spouse who left for work one morning — setting up a lane closure, installing a sign, repairing a road, keeping the rest of us safe — and did not come home.

This year, the ATSS Foundation is proud to award 12 Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarships for the 2026–27 academic year, including two Chuck Bailey Memorial Scholarships recognizing students with a strong commitment to volunteerism. Behind each name is a family that has known unimaginable grief — and a young person determined to move forward.

Their fields of study are as wide as the future itself: architecture and astrophysics, health science and criminal justice, landscape architecture and the electrical trade, business, psychology and environmental science. What they share is resilience — and a community of donors who decided their grief would not have to be faced alone.

Nowhere is that resilience clearer than in the Jones family of Detroit. In 2025, Cedric Jones was struck and killed by a driver who veered off the road while he repaired a sewer basin. This year, four members of his family — his wife, Roshanda, and their children Cameron, Dionne and Brooklyn — are all Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarship recipients, pursuing everything from Christian counseling to the electrical trade as they honor his legacy through education.

For some students, the loss came before they were even born. Chris Hutt II and Katie Hutt never met their father, Christopher, who died in 2006 installing a speed limit sign. Today Katie is beginning graduate studies in architecture, and this year she is one of two Chuck Bailey Memorial Scholarship recipients — alongside Mary Sollars, a junior at Elon University whose father, David, was killed in a work zone in 2019.

“The Foundation has just really made it possible to achieve my dreams and be where I want to be without having that financial burden.”
— Katie Hutt, University of Tennessee graduate & 2026–27 recipient

And this year, we get to celebrate what comes next. Four former recipients have graduated: Alex Perez (Computer Science, Indiana University), Katie Hutt (Architecture, University of Tennessee), Mariela Lara (Environmental Science & Policy, Cal State Long Beach) and Sydney Parsons, who earned her paramedic certification at Central Washington University and now spends her days helping others in their hardest moments — a full-circle testament to what this program makes possible.

“I am extremely grateful and lucky to be where I am today, and would not have been able to do so without your overwhelming support!”
— Sydney Parsons, paramedic & Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarship graduate

The Foundation’s goal has always been to one day give out zero scholarships — because that would mean zero work zone fatalities and serious injuries. Until that day comes, these students remind us why this program matters. Every scholarship is a promise kept to a family in their darkest hour.

Help more students turn heartbreak into hope. Donate to the ATSS Foundation today.

Learn more about the Roadway Worker Memorial Scholarship and the Chuck Bailey Memorial Scholarship programs at foundation.atssa.com/scholarship.