USC Trustee and Rossier Board of Councilors member Verna B. Dauterive ME ’49, EdD ’66 has made a $25,000 gift to the school. The generous gift, part of the Campaign for the USC Rossier School, was made at The Academy level, the school’s leadership giving society, recognizing Dauterive in the Dean’s Laureate Circle, the highest giving level of The Academy.
Dauterive’s gift of $25,000 over the next five years will be used to support the Dr. Verna B. and Peter W. Dauterive Scholarship, which was created in 1985 to attract meritorious black students to USC. The scholarship was the first major minority graduate student scholarship in Rossier, and is awarded to an extraordinary doctoral student with demonstrated financial need.
Dauterive was the Emery Stoops Lecturer for the USC Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa International Dinner on January 25. In that address, she noted the importance of recognizing the ability of all students to learn and succeed, and engaging them with teachers and school leaders who can facilitate that.
Dauterive, who received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the USC Rossier, had a 62-year career with the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she served as a teacher, superintendent’s coordinator of integration programs, administrator of university relations and principal. When she was first hired by the district, Dauterive was its youngest teacher and one of only four African Americans in the school district.
While employed with LAUSD, Dauterive earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in education at USC, taking classes at night and on weekends. Her dissertation was a historical-legal study of integration in U.S. public schools, and has been widely used as a reference for law students. Dauterive served in a variety of administrative capacities at the district, and in 1982, she became principal of Franklin Avenue Elementary School – a job she held until her retirement in 2005.
In 2012, Dauterive gave $30 million to endow the new USC social sciences building, Verna B. and Peter W. Dauterive Hall, in memory of her late husband, a 1949 graduate of the USC Marshall School of Business.
For more information on supporting student scholarships, contact Diana Hernandez, director of annual giving, at dehernan@usc.edu.
