Bonny Cain, a longtime educator who spent the past 11 years as superintendent of the Pearland Independent School District near Houston, on Monday began duties as superintendent of the Waco Independent School District. Her promise to the school board and audience the night of her hiring: “We are going to do at Waco ISD what no one says can be done.”

Cain’s arrival comes as district officials worry about funding cuts by the state and new statewide tests. Indeed, the night of Cain’s hiring, the school board froze teacher pay in an effort to avoid the possibility of extensive layoffs. Waco ISD stands to lose as much as $15 million in state funding next year.

In an interview with the Tribune-Herald editorial board last week, Cain discussed the need for teachers to gain deeper insights into the problems students face; vowed better communications with the public about successes in the district; talked about the personal and professional challenges of bringing change to a district; and addressed a wave of anti-administrator sentiment that Gov. Rick Perry fueled this month.

What was your first day of work here like?

Overwhelming.

Why?

When you grow up in a system that started out with 5,000 students and you end up with 18,700, you slowly get to know people. You know everybody, you know their story, you know how they got there. And then you come to a place that has 15,000 students and, well, there’s just so many schools to get to know here. Pearland ISD had 23 schools at 18,700, and we’ve got 32 at 15,000. So you know what I’m doing? When I’m with a principal and I get their information, I take their picture so I can match faces with it all. (Laughter across the room.) I mean, it’s really helped me!

Was there any moment of shock and awe that you encountered in your first couple of days?

I found a lot of people who are hoping against all hope that the board was right. They’re hoping against hope that everything is going to click because school personnel want the same thing that this community wants and that you want. And they don’t know why it hasn’t worked before.

I hear that Sheryl Davis was upset that you didn’t start a week sooner. That’s how much she hated being interim superintendent.

Bless her heart. I will say that the first day, I asked her how she managed to do both jobs. I can’t imagine running both the business part and the instructional part. But there are so many good people here. They’re like cheerleaders — and they have ideas, too.

In your talks with board members, is there one underlying message they wanted to drive home?

The overwhelming message is we want to be academically ranked exemplary — that the kids deserve it, the teachers deserve it, the business community deserves it, the parents deserve it and Waco ISD deserves it. Do whatever it takes, legal and ethical, that gets this district to exemplary.

We understand you’ve been really getting out and meeting a lot of folks in recent weeks.

This community is so unusual. The support for public education here is amazing.

Yet problems do exist. One priority of Virginia DuPuy and the Greater Waco Community Education Alliance is getting parents more involved in their children’s education. That includes childhood initiatives that now seem to be on the chopping block in Austin.

And of all things to put on the chopping block. When your kids get to kindergarten, they can read, they can sort of write, they know their colors. They’re ready to go. And they’re sitting next to a child who doesn’t know his colors and cannot spell his name. What the early childhood program does is bridge that gap. Because once you start out behind in kindergarten, you’re behind forever. If they do away with pre-K, we’d have to see if there was any way to locally fund it. You can’t always be behind. It’s so discouraging. We can’t ignore this problem.

What do you think the Legislature needs to do in its funding crisis?

They need to equitably and adequately fund public schools. When they didn’t allow school districts to raise taxes anymore, they dropped the local tax rate to $1.04 and said they would make up for all this, that these businesses that weren’t taxed were going to pay their fair share of taxes. Well, either they’re not enforcing it or it was too low a rate. I think everyone who gains from Texas students and Texas education should pay taxes, including businesses. You know, a lot of them have these limited partnerships in New Jersey and that’s how they get out of paying franchise taxes here in Texas. There’s a lot of people who aren’t paying taxes.

You’re talking about loopholes.

It’d be easy to fill them up, too, except you know what a loophole is — it means a special interest group is at work. The reason a loophole is there is because a lobbying group is putting pressure on people. Why should there be a loophole? Why shouldn’t everyone pay their fair share of taxes? They just need to go back and fix that part of it — or else let school districts control their taxes again, including allowing them to raise taxes without having to go to an election. At one time you voted for seven people and you said, “Run this school district.” And if they thought raising property taxes was appropriate, then they felt they were representing their community. And if they were wrong, they got voted out. What’s wrong with that system? And if enough people are mad, they can get enough of them on the board and lower taxes. But the community should decide at what level it funds education. It was always that way in Texas. It’s the American way.

You’ve gone from a very fast-growing suburban, wealthy school district to a district that doesn’t fit that description at all and has a high degree of poverty, plus a lot of aging infrastructure. A lot of the growth you benefited from in Pearland is outside the Waco district. Why would you make that switch?

Well, there are several reasons. One you’ve reported in your paper. The average tenure of a superintendent is like 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years. I’d been at Pearland ISD for 11 years. When you’re a superintendent and in that highly visible a position, over time you’ve said no to just enough people, and the time finally comes for a change. Actually, the board in Pearland said, “You know, we wanted to get to exemplary and you got us to exemplary.” But you don’t usually get to exemplary without annoying a certain number of people.

Who did you annoy?

Well, you’ll find some teachers who don’t want to be accountable for their students. It’s very easy for some to say, “I’m a great teacher, they’re just not good learners.” But you have to take the attitude that, to be exemplary, if that student fails, I fail. You have to have the attitude that failure is just not an option. And you have to have this attitude about every single kid. There’s a school here that missed being exemplary by just one kid — one question on the writing test. Every kid counts, every phone call to a parent counts, every bit of tutoring counts. But to get that kind of rigor and time-on-task, there’s some teachers who don’t want to work that hard. Result: They don’t like the superintendent.

But why would you come to this district as opposed to one more like Pearland?

Well, when I went to Pearland as one of four elementary principals, it was, in some respects, more like Waco is now. It was a struggling school district of about 5,000 kids, but it was a district that decided it was not going to have mediocre student performance. There had been white flight there, too. By the time I left, Pearland was a majority-minority district and our enrollment was 18,700 — more than what you have in Waco. If you want to know if you’re a capable administrator, go to a place where it’s more difficult — and it’s a lot more difficult when you have students who come from poverty because you have to deal with so many more factors. But in the end, it can also be more rewarding.

I remember when the local country club brought in a new chef. The first things he did was take chicken-fried steak off the menu and substitute round plates with triangular plates. There was almost rioting in the club and soon he was gone. How do you implement change? How do you introduce triangular plates and take chicken-fried steak off the menu?

Change is only going to happen here because the school board, which is deeply grounded in the community, says it wants these things to happen. I think, too, the upper socio-economic group in this community realizes that the success of our community rides on that 88 percent of kids (on free and reduced lunches). If you ignore them long enough, pretty soon everybody else is going to be going to Midway, to private schools and to other places. If you want Waco to be a powerhouse again in athletics and academics — the way it was at one time — you have to realize you’re not going anywhere if this group (of economically disadvantaged students) don’t go with you.

You can’t really raise some of these kids at school, yet I sense that’s what’s expected of schools.

If the parenting skills aren’t there, someone still needs to take care of these kids. When we have those kinds of kids, it’s our job to make up the difference. You don’t lower your standards but you make sure they have the skills they need. We can’t have those teachers who say of a kid, “How much do those tennis shoes cost? They probably paid $120 for those tennis shoes and yet they’re on the free or reduced lunch program.” Well, if you have that attitude, you really don’t need to be in Waco ISD. You know why he’s got on those tennis shoes? He’s got on those tennis shoes because he’s proud and because all his friends also have them. For kids and peer groups, that’s the thing. But maybe he doesn’t have a pencil. You know what? You give him a pencil. And yet some teacher will make a win/lose situation over some kid’s not having a pencil. Five points off because he doesn’t have a pencil and he has on expensive tennis shoes! It’s that kind of stuff. You have to think differently.

How do you get the teachers pumped up? They see all this rhetoric and budget cuts discussed in Austin and feel very unappreciated and here they have new, harder tests coming up.

Teachers are the most abused group of people I’ve ever met. They’re not paid enough, they work incredible hours, they’re not appreciated and they’re hammered all the time. And the message from Austin is, “You’re not really worth me paying you that much.” They’re staggering under the load of test expectations, district expectations, parent expectations and plenty of mixed messages.

But how do you turn that around?

 We need to celebrate the successes of teachers more. My intention is to change convocation and celebrate those campuses that are exemplary. We need to recognize them, celebrate them and reinforce them.

Of late, an anti-administrator movement has kicked in with lots of dubious quotations of teacher versus non-teacher ratios.

It is my opinion that Austin started all this to take some of the heat off them. Why do we have so many people in the central office? Well, when they made us do No Child Left Behind, we got four more people in the central office who keep up with No Child Left Behind stuff. When they said, “We want to have this Safe Schools Initiative done our way” — that’s two more people. They said we had to do statewide testing. Now we have this whole testing department. Whose fault is it we got all those people? That’s what they don’t tell you in Austin. Look at how many of those positions we wouldn’t have if we didn’t have so many unfunded mandates.

Is there a message you want to convey to the public through us?

It’s the same thing I’ve been saying throughout the district: We’re going to do in Waco ISD what they say can’t be done. We’re going to get those kids back (who have fled to other schools in the area). We’re going to be so successful that we’ll give a new problem to the school board some day. We’re going to create so much growth we’re going to have to build another high school because we have so many kids wanting to come here. We deserve a dynamic school district that takes its kids, no matter where they are, and makes them successful, thriving adults who want to come back to Waco and have kids and raise them in this school district.

Interview condensed and edited by Bill Whitaker.