Enduring Gratitude

A Lesson in Perseverance

At Hotchkiss, Rhonda Trotter ’79 Faltered at First; Then Her Mother Set Her Straight

A month after she arrived at Hotchkiss, Rhonda R. Trotter ’79 was ready to pack up and head home. Her mother convinced her to stick it out, and the tenacity she developed at Hotchkiss continues to serve her well in her career as a trailblazing attorney in the Los Angeles legal community. Now, she is giving back through service as a trustee and through generous gifts to the School.

BY WENDY CARLSON

WHEN RHONDA TROTTER arrived in Lakeville as a lower mid in 1976, she walked onto a nearly vacant campus. The snap of cool fall air was a departure from the sunny skies of Los Angeles, where she grew up. She remembers stepping out of the taxi with her suitcase in hand, finding her way to Buehler Hall, walking into her empty dorm room, and thinking, subjects. That evening, she fished a dime out of her pocket and called her mother from the payphone in her dorm.

Her words came tumbling out in fits and starts: “I told her I’d done the best I could, but clearly I wasn’t capable, that these kids are smarter than me ... that I needed to come home,” she says.

Her mother, a public school teacher

PHOTO: WENDY CARLSON

‘Oh, wow, what did I sign myself up for?’” Once the campus filled with students and classes got underway, she began to feel more comfortable. Then, in mid-October, she received a dismal report card, and her spirits plummeted: two Cs, one C+, and two Ds. She was devastated. In her public school, she had been a straight-A student; suddenly, she was close to failing several

and a single mom, listened patiently, but she would have none of it.

“You wanted to go to Hotchkiss, you made that choice, and you don’t get to quit. So, no, you have to continue to do your best,” she told her daughter.

“That,” says Trotter, “is why I stayed at Hotchkiss. It was my mother telling me, ‘You don’t get to quit.’”

Despite that terrible first report card, she soldiered on. Trotter was just 14 years old at the time, having started elementary school a year early, and she comes from a family with a legacy of perseverance. Both her parents were born in Mississippi and attended Rust College, a small, historically Black college. Shortly after they married, her father’s youngest brother began a relationship with a white woman, and the entire family was driven out of the state by the Ku Klux Klan.

Her grandfather rushed to put the entire extended family –– including Trotter’s thenpregnant mother –– on a school bus, then drove them all to Compton, California.

The family was part of “The Great Migration,” also known as the Great Northward Migration, when nearly six million Blacks left the rural southern United States for the urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1916 and 1970.

Although some left the South to seek employment elsewhere, many others, including her family, were forced out by what Trotter calls “domestic terrorism.”

The family eventually settled in Los Angeles, where Trotter was born and attended school. By the time she entered junior high, her parents had divorced, and her mother was raising two children on her own as a public school teacher. When Trotter was in ninth grade, representatives of a Colorado prep school visited her school to talk with gifted students about two full scholarships the school was offering through a city-wide competition.

“I had never heard of boarding school before, other than it was a place where kids who were in trouble go,” Trotter says.

Impressed by a slideshow they gave of the school, Trotter entered the scholarship competition. She didn’t get it, but she remained intrigued with the notion of boarding school and asked her guidance counselor to look into other options. Ultimately, she received a full scholarship to Hotchkiss through A Better Chance, a nonprofit that helps talented young people of color attend academically rigorous boarding, day, and public schools. Trotter now serves on the board of directors of A Better Chance, and, in 2018, she became a Hotchkiss trustee.

She often tells colleagues that she was

[Trotter] often tells colleagues that she was never more academically challenged in her life than she was at Hotchkiss.

never more academically challenged in her life than she was at Hotchkiss — including attending college at Stanford University and law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and taking the California Bar Exam.

When Trotter entered Hotchkiss, she had her sights set on becoming a neurosurgeon. But a near-failing grade in chemistry her lower mid year threw her dreams into jeopardy. “I had an F, but I pulled the grade up to a D+ by the end of the year, and I was happy about it,” she recalls. Still, she knew she had to do better. That summer, she enrolled in a chemistry course at UCLA and earned an A.

“I was only 15 when I took the course, and I remember riding the bus to the UCLA campus with the other college students, who were wondering how a high school kid aced a college-level chemistry course. I tried to explain to them that I had gotten a D at this prep school and that I wanted to be a doctor, so I needed to do well in chemistry,” Trotter says.

“I tell that story because I think it gives an indication of the level of academic rigor at Hotchkiss,” she adds.

Looking back, Trotter says her academic struggles were related to her inadequate understanding of how to study properly. Having her own textbooks at Hotchkiss, where she could highlight passages and mark up pages, was itself unfamiliar. In the Los Angeles public school system, Trotter had been issued outdated textbooks and was forbidden to annotate.

“Reading for comprehension and analysis was also something we were never really taught to do,” Trotter recalls, and she notes that the smaller class sizes at Hotchkiss were both “a blessing and completely intimidating.”

“In my public school, some of my classes had 40 students in them. At Hotchkiss, there might be 10 students in a class, and there was pressure to contribute something valuable to the discussion. I felt like there were kids in class who were contributing ideas about the readings that had never even occurred to me,” she says.

Fortunately, she had instructors who helped her along the way. “English instructor Geoff Marchant exhorted us to look for the ‘DIM’– the deep inner meaning – in the literature we read and discussed in each class; AP Biology instructor Jim Morrill guided us through multi-week dissections of fetal pigs and other specimens, ensuring that we understood the functions of all organs. And French instructor Peter Beaumont, in an entirely good-natured and jovial manner, could strike fear in class as he called on each student in a ‘round robin’ exercise of conjugating the verb of the day, with a wrong answer resulting in said student moving to the last chair in the last row, with a grade for the day to match,” she says.

“Intense? Absolutely. But those of us blessed with a Hotchkiss education left with a level of preparation and confidence that is not easily matched.”

Academics were not the only area in which she struggled. Trotter was one of just a handful of Black girls enrolled at the School. At that time, she explains, the Dining Hall had only long rectangular tables. “All the Black students, students of color, the few Asian students, some Jewish

students, and some not-yet-openly gay students, maybe 15 of us altogether, could fit at one of those tables,” she says.

“We were united, many of us, by feeling a bit awkward and out of place at Hotchkiss. We supported each other –– and we had Walter Crain,” she adds.

Walter Crain P’86,’89 was the first Black member of the faculty and a long-serving and beloved teacher, coach, and dean of students. He was also Trotter’s basketball coach. In 2013, when former students, faculty members, and parents established the Walter J. Crain Jr. P’86,’89 Scholarship, Trotter made a generous contribution to the scholarship in his honor.

After Hotchkiss, Trotter earned a B.A. in political science at Stanford University, where she decided she was more interested in law than medicine. For about six years, she worked for California Tomorrow, an educational nonprofit, after which she earned a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she was senior articles editor of the California Law Review, winner of the McBaine Moot Court Honors Program, and recipient of the Stephen Finney Jamison Award for outstanding scholarship and advocacy. Today, as a partner in the law firm of Arnold & Porter in Los Angeles, Trotter represents corporate clients in a variety of matters, including intellectual property, product liability, and employment disputes.

Among her most interesting “noncorporate” clients was the late, great musical artist Prince, whom she represented in both litigation and transactional matters for the four years prior to his death in 2016. “He was incredibly bright, and he read voraciously and wanted to engage in a large variety of topics, so we largely talked about current events, literature, and his philosophies about life,” she recalls.

Trotter is known in the legal community for several significant cases she brought to a verdict. In 2019, she won a multi-million dollar verdict for Planned Parenthood in a widely-reported federal court jury trial on all claims against anti-abortion activists.

Today, despite her busy career, she has made a commitment to give back to Hotchkiss through her work as a trustee. She first reconnected with the School when she attended her 20th Reunion in 1999; shortly thereafter, she was invited to return to Hotchkiss as a panelist on Martin Luther King Day. Once back on campus, she realized that Hotchkiss had made dramatic shifts in terms of diversity. “I could see that the School had changed in a positive way,” she says.

After talking to students of color during that MLK weekend, she left with the impression that they had a greater sense of involvement and acceptance in the School community. “Students of color at that time really felt that they were part of Hotchkiss in a way that my generation had struggled with,” she says.

After she joined the board of A Better Chance in 2011, she began mentoring students in the program, including students who attended Hotchkiss. Her connections to the School strengthened, and in 2018, she joined the board of trustees. Currently, she chairs the Community Life Committee, serves on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee and the Admission and Financial Aid Committee, and serves as a trustee member of the Advisory Committee for Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education.

In her view, the School’s biggest challenges are continuing to build the resources to bolster DEI initiatives; supporting the curriculum to ensure that Hotchkiss provides a top-rate education and prepares students for their future in a multicultural society; and offering sufficient financial aid to attract the best and brightest students.

“Hotchkiss changed the trajectory of my life,” she says of her experience in Lakeville. She hopes to ensure that future Hotchkiss students will have the same opportunities she had by extending her philanthropy to The Hotchkiss Fund. The Hotchkiss Fund provides vital financial support to key programs, community, and daily operations that define a Hotchkiss education. H

Trotter is pictured first row, third from the left, in a 1979 Misch picture of the girls varsity basketball team.