A Haddonfield Kid Just Got a Blank Check for College

Somewhere in this town of brick sidewalks and Saturday-morning coffee lines, a 17-year-old named Luke Patterson woke up this week to news that most high schoolers only daydream about: the whole thing — tuition, room, board, all four years, at any accredited college in the country — is paid for.

Patterson, a junior at Haddonfield Memorial High School, has been named a Coolidge Scholar, one of the most competitive merit awards in the United States. The scholarship, given by the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, is a full ride in the truest sense of the phrase. And the number of students who get one each year is small enough to be startling: Patterson is among just five nationwide. He is also, remarkably, the first recipient from South Jersey since the foundation began awarding the scholarships in 2016.

Let that sink in. A decade of some of the sharpest students in the region applying, and the first one to break through is a kid from Haddonfield.

The person underneath the prize

What I find myself stuck on isn’t the prestige, though — it’s the shape of the young man underneath it. Because when you read the list of things Luke Patterson does with his time, you don’t picture a student hunched over test-prep books chasing a trophy. You picture someone who’s genuinely paying attention to the world around him. He runs track and cross country. He writes for the school newspaper — a Gazette kind of kid, if I can be forgiven for saying so. He belongs to the Anti-Bias Club and serves as historian of the Student Council, which means he’s the one who remembers what the group did and why it mattered. He’s a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, the youth auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force. And he’s an active member of Grace Episcopal Church, right here in town.

That’s not a résumé. That’s a person. That’s a kid who shows up.Max Cedar

The town gets to point

There’s a temptation, when a story like this lands, to make it about the school, or the town, or the zip code — to hang the achievement on Haddonfield’s reputation like another banner in the gym. But that gets it backward. Haddonfield didn’t earn this scholarship. Luke Patterson did, one early-morning run and one late-night newspaper deadline at a time. The town just got the good fortune of being the place he’s from.

And maybe that’s the part worth celebrating most. Because every community wants to believe it’s the kind of place that produces young people like this — curious, generous, disciplined, unshowy about it. It’s easy to say. It’s harder to point at proof. This week, Haddonfield gets to point.

Luke Patterson has a blank check and the whole country of colleges to spend it on. Wherever he decides to go, he’ll carry a little bit of South Jersey with him. And if he ever needs a reminder of where the story started, he can just pick up the school paper he wrote for and read his own byline.

Go get ’em, kid. The whole town’s pulling for you.

Know a South Jersey student doing remarkable things? Tell the newsroom — these are the stories we most love to tell.

Based on reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.