Courtesy Patti Melcher

Patti Melcher (MBA 1986) never intended to open a school but when her first child, Katie, struggled with learning disabilities, the private equity strategist turned her attention to finding the best learning environment for her daughter.

Melcher cofounded the Joy School in 1997, as an experiment, with just four students. Katie and three others would benefit from both individualized attention and interaction with other children. Jerome Rosner, an optometrist and University of Houston professor (who passed away in 2014), and Shara Bumgarner, a Houston elementary school teacher who is now head of school, set the simple educational philosophy—“just teach them”—which entailed meeting the students, academically and otherwise, exactly where they were.

Melcher served as president and handled the business side of the school, which grew quickly. When the organization established a board about five years after its founding, she served as chair. While Melcher couldn’t see the future of the Joy School clearly, she knew she wanted to build something that would outlast its founders: “It didn’t matter how big the school was; it needed to be a viable institution that really helped these kids,” Melcher observes.

Today, the school enrolls about 150 students—kindergarten through eighth grade—who have a variety of social, learning, and communication disorders, from approximately 40 communities throughout the Houston area. Melcher, who left the board in the mid-2000s and now serves as a trustee of the endowment, has returned to private equity, cofounding EIV Capital in 2009. And Katie is thriving in a semi-independent community for adults with intellectual disabilities. Looking back, Melcher says, “I feel really lucky to have been able to do something that’s really made a difference, not just for my daughter and my family but also for hundreds of families.”

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