Rona was born and grew up in New York City, spending much of her childhood watching Westerns (Wagon Train, Bonanza, Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, etc.), reading and rereading the Little House books and imagining that her bunk-bed was a Conestoga Wagon. Being honored as a Pioneer is a delightful honor for this Colorado transplant.

Rona attended public schools in New York and began college at Bennington College in Vermont, a small non-traditional, liberal arts school. She stopped out of college for two years living in Hartford, Connecticut where she first worked as research assistant on a major school desegregation lawsuit and then for the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. She finished her undergraduate studies at Yale College and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. She taught at Williams College for one year before moving out to Colorado to join the non-traditional Economics Department at the University of Denver .

In 1984 she joined the staff of Governor Dick Lamm as his education aide, just as the education reform movement was getting underway. From there she went on to become a policy consultant specializing in education and poverty issues. She worked primarily with the Piton Foundation and the Education Commission of the States, with smaller projects for the Public Education and Business Coalition and the Kettering Foundation. For ECS she wrote numerous papers on various aspects of education reform including: urban schools, school choice, active learning, and business support for reform.

In 1992 Rona was named principal of New Vista High School. The explicit goal was to create a school that broke the mold of secondary school practice. At the time there were just a handful of small high schools across the country. Now New Vista is part of a vast national network.

In addition to her work at New Vista, Rona has written opinion pieces for educational publications and presented extensively on the issue of “college for everyone”. Between 2000 and 2006 she served as principal coach for the Gates Foundation funded Colorado Small Schools Initiative, supporting the development of new small high schools designed to meet the needs of urban youth.

Rona has one daughter, Zoe Kline, who attends New Vista. They can often be seen hiking the trails of the mountain parks and in the summer, climbing Fourteeners.