Spend a few minutes with Tiffany Anderson and you may feel like an out-of-shape runner trying to catch up with the marathon leader.

The new superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools is fast, efficient and seems to have one thing on her mind: students.

Four months into the job, that's led the 33-year-old St. Louis native to some tough decisions.

In June, Anderson set off an angry protest by a small group of parents and residents when she recommended that the Montgomery County School Board reassign, or essentially demote, Christiansburg Middle School Principal Peter Wonson to a teaching position.

Though school officials have not officially disclosed the reason, they acknowledged that the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office received 24 calls about 31 bomb threats at the school and three calls about fires this year.

The board voted June 21 to demote Wonson. Before the vote, some residents pleaded with the board not to accept the recommendation, saying the principal of one year had improved morale at school. They have since circulated angry e-mail messages to the superintendent, school board members and reporters.

The board and Anderson said the public doesn't know all of the details but add that the matter is a personnel issue they will not discuss.

Anderson subsequently announced that Wonson had under-reported school discipline and crime incidents in an annual report to the state, further inflaming Wonson's supporters.

Anderson said she understands that some question her judgment because she is new and because Wonson has circulated what she called "misinformation."

"I will always put kids first," she said. "Not politics. It doesn't matter how much people yell and scream."

Anderson has also made some tough calls regarding the budget. She recommended the school board close the Riner cannery, cut out-of-town staff development for administrators and eliminate meals at principal's meetings.

Anderson grew up in St. Louis. She was a quiet little girl.

"She was sensitive," her mother, Edna Spencer, said. "She could pick up on the needs of the kids in the church, the kids on her block."

Her parents were active in the civil rights movement and taught her the importance of serving others.

While working in the early 1990s on her bachelor's degree in elementary education at Saint Louis University, Anderson met her husband, Stanley. They married Aug. 14, 1993.

In 1994, Anderson completed her bachelor's degree and then spent four years as a teacher at inner-city elementary schools, one of which had an 80 percent poverty rate. The experience was eye-opening for Anderson, who grew up in an upper-middle class area. At one school, she started an after-school program to offer tutoring and to encourage parent participation.

Spencer said her daughter had found her calling.

"You've got to know the voice that's talking to you," Spencer said.

In 1998, Anderson was recruited to be principal at Clark Accelerated Academy in St. Louis. She also earned her master's degree, began working on her doctorate and had two children.

"I can't tell you how I do it, but the energy, I just have it," Anderson said.

Her husband sometimes toted the couple's first baby to his classes at graduate school, where he was pursing a master's degree in biology to become a doctor.

At Clark Accelerated Academy, located in a crime-ridden area where gangs and poverty were rampant, Anderson thrived. She launched programs to engage students in learning and parents in their children's educations.

"That's when I really started to volunteer at the school," said Debra Jones-Williams, parent resource specialist at Clark Accelerated Academy who was president of the Parent Teacher Organization at the time, "because I had a principal who was more about the parents and the students than the paperwork."

Anderson was only in her 20s when she served as principal, but Jones-Williams said, "I think parents related to her more being very young and for having children of her own ... As a parent, she understood."

Anderson installed a donated washer and dryer at the school and told parents they could do a load for free if they spent an hour in a classroom.

If a student tore up a bulletin board, he or she had to replace it. If a student was disruptive, he or she did community service. Anderson piped jazz music into the cafeteria during lunch and told students they had to talk at volumes lower than the music.

She asked teachers for input on lessons and the budget, met them for lunch and held retreats. She mopped the floors with her custodians.

In 2003, the Rockwood School District in Eureka, Mo., recruited her to be assistant superintendent for student services.

Anderson was the first black administrator at the school. She noticed that many of the minority students who were bused in were performing worse than students at her former city schools because they lived too far to receive services at home.

Anderson hired a full-time social worker to make out-of-district home visits, established a foundation to pay for eyeglasses and other items and made sure needy students applied for college scholarships. For parents, she offered a mentor program, transportation to school events and a mobile enrollment unit so they could conveniently register their children for school.

In March, the Montgomery County School Board hired Anderson.

In the short time she has been head of schools, she has ensured that nurses are stationed at elementary schools every day, achieved a 3.5 percent salary increase for employees, overhauled the division's Web site and revamped recruiting procedures.

She sees her major challenge as getting all Montgomery County's schools fully accredited; only nine of 20 have attained the status.

Anderson and her husband live with their 10-year-old daughter, Whitney and 8-year-old son, Christopher, in a townhouse they are leasing in Blacksburg. They are still looking for a house to buy.

Stanley Anderson was recently hired as an OB/GYN at Carilion Franklin Memorial Hospital in Rocky Mount. The couple plans to buy a second residence closer to the hospital.

Tiffany Anderson goes to bed at 9:30 p.m. when she doesn't have meetings and gets up at 3 a.m. The early morning hours are when she makes her children's lunches, does household chores, reads the papers and answers e-mails.

When the Andersons aren't working, they are enjoying family time. Anderson rarely attends social events that don't revolve around family members.

"Stanley and I have both said we cherish each other so much and our family ... when we leave [work] it's family time," she said.