Melissa is a lifelong Montgomerian. She graduated from Jefferson Davis High School and trained as an elementary teacher at Auburn University at Montgomery. She taught in Montgomery Public Schools, started a preschool fitness program in the mid-1990s, and raised three daughters who all went through MPS.
She ran for the Montgomery County School Board in 2006 and won. She served twelve years, six as Vice President and President. She traveled to Washington as a delegate for the National School Boards Association. In 2015, the Alabama Association of School Boards named her Member of the Year.
She stepped down in 2018, proud of the work she'd helped build and trusting the district was in steady hands.
It hasn't stayed that way. The career tech program at Montgomery Mall she fought for. The magnet program parents drove across the county to reach. The financial discipline that held it all together. She's watched all of it get thinner and less steady.
So at the end of 2025, she decided she wasn't done after all.
“The work we built is coming apart. District 5 deserves a board member with the experience to put it back together.”Melissa Snowden
What she's running for is a school board our community can believe in again. One that keeps students at the center of every decision, holds onto the people doing good work, and answers to the parents and taxpayers who sent them there. Montgomery has seen what happens when a board loses those habits. Melissa has seen the version that works.
