The NATSO Foundation Awards $25,000 in Scholarships; 2017 Application Process Open

The legacy of the Bill Moon Scholarship continued in 2016 when The NATSO Foundation presented five students with ties to the truckstop and travel plaza industry $5,000 each to put toward their studies. The Bill Moon Scholarship Program has been changing lives for more than 20 years, awarding more than $300,000 in scholarships to date.

This year’s recipients include repeat winners, a truckstop employee and dependents of truckstop employees. The winners of the NATSO Foundation’s 2016 Bill Moon Scholarship are:

Kelly Bolton. Bolton is an employee at Muralt’s Ambest Travel Plaza in Misoula, Mont. She is in the forestry program at Salish Kootenai College.

Carianne Jones. Jones is an employee at TravelCenters of America #241. Jones is attending Purdue University Northwest as a first-year graduate student and is working on her Masters of Accountancy degree and a graduate certificate in forensic accounting and fraud investigation.

Daryll Marie Carlson. Carlson is a previous recipient of the Bill Moon Scholarship. She is entering her senior year studying marine biology at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. Her father, Daryll Carlson, is the maintenance manager at the Sacramento 49er Travel Plaza in Sacramento, Calif.

Leianna McIntire. McIntire is an employee at TravelCenters of America #022. She is attending the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Conn.

Rebecca Sistad. Sistad is an employee at the Coffee Cup Travel Plaza, Vermillion, S.D. She is in her first year of the clinical psychology doctoral program at the University of South Dakota.

The NATSO Foundation’s scholarship program is named after Bill Moon, who founded the Iowa 80 Group and made substantial contributions to NATSO, actively supporting and participating in industry-related government affairs issues. He served as chairman of NATSO in 1989 and as the first chairman of the NATSO Foundation in 1990.

The NATSO Foundation is now accepting applications for 2017. Applications must be submitted by May 15, 2017. The scholarships are open to truckstop and travel plaza owners and operators, their employees and their legal dependents.