Join us on Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Sponsored by the Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, Yale University
In Person Meeting | 4:45 p.m.
All are welcome to the talk.
CAAS members and guests may register for dinner.
About Patricia Melton
Patricia Melton is an award-winning, innovative educator who has increased educational access for communities across a variety of sectors including colleges, traditional public, pubic charter and independent schools. She is the President of New Haven Promise, a place-based scholarship, support and economic development engine that funds up to full tuition at in-state public Connecticut colleges or universities for deserving high school students.
As President, Melton has implemented several initiatives to benefit New Haven’s youth, including the Ambassadors Program, a peer mentoring initiative mentioned by the Obama White House as a promising practice. Under her leadership, New Haven Promise’s applications, awards, internships have increased dramatically, its social imprint leads all Promise programs in the country by tenfold. The public schools in New Haven enjoyed a 50-year high in enrollment prior to the pandemic, having increased nearly 29% since the creation of New Haven Promise in 2010.
Throughout her career, Melton’s initiatives have impacted more than 25,000 students. Prior to returning to Connecticut, Melton coached several small school design teams, which created nine Early College High Schools throughout Ohio and Indiana. She contributed to Vincennes University’s early college replication effort, assisting with the startup of four early college sites across Indiana.
She served as the chief academic officer for the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation, Indiana’s third-largest school district. She led the district through a sweeping transformation, implementing new strategies using a distributed leadership model. The year after she implemented new strategies — that district met the standards of the No Child Left Behind Adequate Yearly Progress for the first time.
Early in her career, Melton served on the Seattle Organizing Committee for the Goodwill Games and helped to create the African American Academy, a culturally-themed small school in Seattle, Washington.
Melton, a Cleveland, Ohio native, was the first in her family to attend college, earning a bachelor’s degree at Yale University and a master’s degree at Arizona State University. She also served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve while a student at Yale.
A track and field walk on in college, Melton is a former U.S. Olympic trials finalist and track and field All-American. She was honored the highest athletic honor in her Yale undergraduate class, The Nellie Elliott Award in 1982. Melton was the 2022 Dick Enberg award recipient and in 2007, she received the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s 2007 Silver Anniversary Award, which recognizes former student-athletes who have distinguished themselves in their chosen field. In 2013, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded Yale University’s George H. W. Bush Award.
Melton embraces commitment to her community through service on a number of nonprofit boards as follows: Yale’s Alumni Board of Governors from 2017-2020, Squash Haven, Siteprojects, Middlesex School, The Shubert, and The Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce.