Patricia Melton

Patricia is the president of New Haven Promise, a place-based scholarship program created for the benefit of local students by The City of New Haven, Yale University, and The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. Highly regarded for her previous reform work in communities from Seattle to Boston, Patricia led several small school design teams that created Early College High Schools throughout Ohio and Indiana, and she served as the chief academic officer for Indiana’s third-largest district.

One of the first girls to attend newly coeducational Middlesex, Patricia was a gifted athlete who continued to excel at Yale University, where she earned her undergraduate degree. She subsequently received her master’s in education from Arizona State University and is working toward her Ph.D. in education at the University of Pennsylvania. Patricia’s outstanding athletic record and professional accomplishments have repeatedly brought her recognition, including the Souders Award (1994), an NCAA Silver Anniversary Award (2007), Yale’s George H.W. Bush ’48 Lifetime of Leadership Award (2013), and the Dick Enberg Award (2022). A 2003 inductee to Middlesex’s Athletic Hall of Fame, she has previously served two terms on the Middlesex Board, from 1988-91 and 1992-2002. Patricia delivered the School’s Bigelow Lecture on public service in 2016 and was the graduation speaker in 2019 – the same spring that she received Middlesex’s Henry Cabot Lodge ’20 Distinguished Alumni Award.