Jackson Wood graduated from Rouse in 2014, ranking 11th in his class. He joined the United States Air Force, and he became a staff sergeant who served at the Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs until his death in 2019. As a way to honor him, the Jackson Wood Scholarship was established in 2020 to benefit college-bound seniors. This year’s scholarship winner is senior Dillon Sinha.

“He would be very pleased to see this scholarship,” Father of Jackson, Ted Wood said. “His hope and dream was to go to college after his six year Air Force commitment and due to his death, he was not able to do that. But given that circumstance, I’m sure he would be very pleased to see that somebody else had an opportunity to have some of their college costs paid for and to do it.”

The deadline to apply is April 1, and the application can be emailed to [email protected]. In the email, seniors must write their contact information, experiences, extracurricular activities and disclose the college attending with reasons along with future aspirations. In addition, seniors should attach a scanned copy of their high school transcript.

“We’ve had really great people apply, but it does not necessarily go to the person with the highest grade point average,” Wood said. “I mean, that’s certainly a consideration, but we consider a whole bunch of different things. That’s why I hope people don’t think that they should not apply because they’re not in the top 10% of their class. We welcome applications from anybody at risk.” 

The winner of the scholarship will be announced April 15 and the scholarship of $1,000, will be paid directly to the college.

“We plan on keeping it going,” Wood said. “The more people that can be aided in financing their education, the better. If we can do it for ten years instead of five years, that would be twice as good.”

As of March 21, there have been no applicants due to an issue with the scholarship link not being shown in the counseling website, but now it’s been resolved. In the past years, there were usually 15-20 applicants each year. 

“I hope [we] get lots of applications because maybe people will say, ‘well, I’m not competing against everybody in the Austin area,” he said.“I’m competing against other Rouse High School seniors, and somebody’s going to get it, so I ought to give it a shot.”

More information about the Jackson Wood scholarship can be here.