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In tiny Cumberland, Ky., she was probably a child of poverty, Katharine Winograd speculates. But she sure didn't know it at the time. The mountains were pretty. She knew everyone in town. Nobody locked a door.

And never - not once, not ever - did her coal-miner father and encyclopedia-selling mother place in her the whisper of a doubt that academic achievement was anything less than a given.

She says this in a soft drawl from the administrative chamber of Central New Mexico Community College, the school she's set to take over as president come July.

She'll become the first woman to lead the 41-year-old college. It's a place that has quietly built a record and a reputation for reaching out to its 26,000 students in a variety of ways to ensure they stay in school, even when life delivers yet another hard knock.

How fitting that someone whose own family endured such knocks should step to the front of the class.

"I don't ever remember them not expecting us to go to school," Winograd said of herself and her five siblings. "We all knew growing up that education was important and necessary to not work in the coal mines."

The role-modeling started early. When she was still young, the family moved to Lexington, Ky., so her father could study to be an electrical engineer.

"It didn't last long," she said. "My family was living on one paycheck. If the car broke down - and we only had one car - my father couldn't get to class, my mother couldn't get to work."

Within a year, they were back in Cumberland, and her father was back in the mines.

Still, her parents kept striving. Besides selling encyclopedias, her mother's jobs over the year included working at a medical clinic so the kids could get health care. Another was at a utility company the children had to pass on their way to and from school and wave at her through a window to assure her they were OK.

Eventually, Mom and the children moved four hours away to Georgetown, Ky., where her mother got a job at Georgetown College. The reason? Children of employees got free tuition.

"I sort of found myself there," said Winograd, who became the first person in her family to graduate from a four-year college. "There was a faculty member who took me by the nape of my neck and showed me what would happen if I didn't stay in school."

It's similar to what she found upon joining CNM 10 years ago.

"It wasn't until I came to CNM - it was TVI back then - that I found my passion," she said. "The people are so committed to the students. The faculty are incredible about stepping out and helping."

"Achievement coaches" from the faculty are paired with students to get to know what problems they're facing outside of school. Scholarships are available to carry students, whose average age is 29, past hurdles as minor as buying a bus pass and as major as needing rent during a rough patch.

The point is not only to keep the students in school but to see them move on to a university or a job.

It's precisely the kind of help her own family could have used.

"My father was an older student, and I don't know that he saw many students like himself in the classroom," she said. "I want people at the college to know that I know what these students are going through. It's close to my heart.

"At graduation, I look at the audience. I know the students work hard, but I also look at the families and how much they sacrifice to make sure those students graduate. I know how much my parents sacrificed."

They'll be in Albuquerque with Winograd on May 12 to celebrate their daughter's latest graduation. While in the running for CNM's presidency this year, she was also polishing off her dissertation at the University of New Mexico, earning the right to call herself "doctor."

As for her father, his own dream of higher education never died. At the age of 65, he took home a hard-won diploma, a coal miner no more.