Former Mansfield ISD superintendent looks back at tumultuous tenure

By Amanda Rogers

Mansfield Record

When Kimberley Cantu took over as superintendent of the Mansfield ISD in January 2020, she could not have imagined what she would face as she led the growing school district.

Yes, she had been a teacher, coach and school administrator for almost 30 years by then, most of that time spent in the Mansfield ISD. She has a doctorate in educational leadership, had been deputy superintendent under Superintendent Jim Vaszauskas for more than a year before he retired in December 2019, and seemed groomed to be the heir apparent to lead the 35,000-student district.

“I didn’t realize I was going to be doing crises management,” Cantu said. “I did it. I don’t know if I’m the best at it, but I did it.”

In the past six years, Cantu has faced a worldwide pandemic, an emergency rollout of online education, a school shooting, a bond election, student protest march and opened three schools. Last fall, she announced that she was looking for a new challenge and left the Mansfield ISD after 27 years in February.

“I don’t know if I would have believed that I could get the district through that,” she said of the multiple crises.

In the first few weeks after taking over as superintendent, Cantu remembers hearing some talk about the COVID virus.

“We heard a little about it before we left for Spring Break (in March),” she said, “but not enough for us to even make some kind of contingency plan. During Spring Break, every day it got closer. You felt it closing in. As we’re getting to the second half of the week, we were getting concerned. We thought maybe we would be out a couple of days, maybe a week. We were thinking we would have to do some catch up.

“Then they shut us down,” Cantu said. “Then they shut us down again for one or two more weeks. We had to sit down and figure out how to get the stuff to the kids. Then we heard we were shut down for the year.”

Cantu had been in group texts with local superintendents about what they were doing and they corresponded almost daily. She and her team had hard questions to answer and no playbook.

“How are we going to feed the kids and support the teachers?” she remembers. “Our auxiliary employees, if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. The major things – we still need to educate and feed the kids and make sure our employees survive.”

The politics of the COVID pandemic were also a stress factor.

“You have polar opposites and they are very loud,” Cantu said. “We were either killing people or we were taking people’s rights away. You could get both emails within 30 minutes.”

The attacks even became personal.

“Someone printed photos of me, hundreds of them and threw them at Newsom Stadium,” she said. “(Police Chief Greg) Minter started walking me out to the car after board meetings.”

In June 2020, hundreds of students from Mansfield High School planned and executed a massive Black Lives Matter march down East Broad Street to protest the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, who were both killed by police. The march, which police estimated drew 1,000-2,000 people, stopped traffic and turned into a peaceful rally, with assistance from local police and Mansfield Mayor Michael Evans.

By late summer 2020, the district knew students would not be going back in person to start the year, so it rolled out a plan to deliver computers to all 36,000 students.

“The device debacle,” Cantu remembered. “Poor planning did not account for the number of people that would be coming to pick up a device. There were too many steps in the process.”

The results made national news as parents, guardians and students lined up in their cars to get a computer, and waited for hours in a line that wound for miles.

“People ran out of gas, there were helicopters overhead,” Cantu said. “On Day 1, we said ‘we have a plan.’ On Day 2, it was better. On Day 3, by noon, it was enough. We called a meeting with technology and went over and inserted ourselves and fixed it. We had never done anything like that before. We had all these devices and they weren’t all operational. They were busting their butts. I may make a mistake, but I will never make that mistake again.”

Then there was the school shooting at Timberview High School on Oct. 6, 2021, when an 18-year-old student shot three people.

“I was heading to a Region II superintendent meeting in Fort Worth and Dr. (Sean) Scott called me,” Cantu said. “Then I get a text – ‘Call me now.’ I turned around.

“We think our cabinet team had been forged in fire in COVID so we went to work,” Cantu said.

They set up shop at the Dr. Jim Vaszauskas Center for Performing Arts because they knew the students would be moved there after they were evacuated from the high school. The process was even more complicated because the alleged shooter was still at large, so the school was locked down and blanketed with police for hours.

“We had this expert say we did it textbook perfect,” Cantu said. “We made all of these adjustments, the things you don’t expect. We didn’t expect all these volunteers to show up. It was quick decision after quick decision. We couldn’t lean on the Timberview staff because they were all in shock.

“The next morning we took it day at a time until we could take it a week at a time,” she said. “We were told to get them back in school as fast as possible or they may never come back.”

Amid all of the turmoil, Cantu tallied wins.

In the fall of 2021, the district opened Brenda Norwood Elementary, Alma Martinez Intermediate and Charlene McKinzey Middle schools. The district broke ground last year on its second early learning academy, and has increased its STEM and fine arts academies.

In May 2024, voters approved a $588.5 million bond, the largest in the district’s history to pay for facilities, upgrades, technology, fine arts and athletics.

“During all of these crises, we’ve still been doing the work,” Cantu said. “There have been a lot of really good things. I’m hoping that despite all of the challenges we’ve faced, our kids have continued to thrive.”

In February, the Mansfield ISD school board announced Cantu’s replacement, Tiffanie Spencer, who had been serving as the school district’s Area Superintendent of Accountability and Special Populations in the Curriculum and Instruction. Spencer will be the district’s third female superintendent (Cantu was the second) and the first Black person to serve as superintendent.

When asked if she had advice for the new superintendent, Cantu said “If you make your core value ‘Students First,’ the majority of your decisions will be right. There’s a lot of things out there that want to distract you from that. Stay focused on that and you’ll be all right.”

For herself, Cantu said she’s not done working, but she does plan to take some time off.

“I can’t do nothing,” she said. “I’ve been working since I was 13. I need to do something, something that has an impact on kids and education.

“I think it’s time (to leave),” she said. “I’m about to be 58. I’ve spent 33 ½ years in education. I feel like I’ve done my job. Now it’s time to show up for my family. I’m going to take three months off. My daughter travels with club volleyball. I’m going to spend time with mom and dad, travel a little.”

Cantu reflects on her tumultuous years as Mansfield ISD superintendent.

“There were so many things that we have gone through, 50 percent good, 50 percent not,” she said. “If I can lay down my head and know I did what was best for the kids, I’m good with it.”

‍