Clark County can’t hire teachers fast enough

Lisa Ferguson

Monday, April 21, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Nowhere is the need for new teachers more evident than in Clark County.

And the word is spreading like wildfire among teaching professionals nationwide that jobs are plentiful here.

The Clark County School District, the 10th largest in the nation, hired 1,500 new teachers for the fall 1996-97 school year and plans to hire an additional 1,200 this year.

But where will these new teachers come from?

A good number will likely be recent graduates of UNLV's College of Education, which boasts that 95 percent of its teaching students find work for the CCSD.

Also, an increasing number of people from universities and other school districts around the country are venturing here in search of work.

Still, the CCSD will be forced to look elsewhere -- even outside the country -- -- to fill its staffing needs, according to Dr. George Ann Rice, assistant superintendent of its human resources division.

"We're having to go to Canada to find occupational therapists and speech therapists" to fill special-education teaching positions, she says. "We can't find them here."

The district regularly attends career fairs at colleges throughout the country. Rice says Pennsylvania has been a "particularly productive" recruitment site, as several districts in that state hire fewer than 50 new teachers annually.

They've even mailed "birthday cards to kids" who are studying in "high needs" subject areas, such as science and bilingual education, she says, "so that they will begin to think this is a good place to live and raise their families."

CCSD recently began working with the University of Nevada, Reno in hopes of luring Northern Nevada and California students south. It's also video-conferencing with students at other universities when "we can't get to them physically."

But recruiting teachers is becoming more difficult. Legislatures in several states are requesting that their colleges of education reduce the number of new teachers they turn out each year, as more are pursuing jobs in other states.

"We fear that kind of thing happening. That would hurt us very seriously because two-thirds of our teachers come from out of state," Rice explains.

Because of this, education professionals are predicting that a severe shortage of teachers will occur within two or three years.

"We have to be ready with alternative means of finding folks," Rice says.

They've contacted the U.S. Department of Energy in an attempt to attract professionals with degrees in chemistry, physics and Earth science, subjects for which teachers are desperately needed.

Through the Alternative Routes to Work program, "We will bring them in and work with them as they continue to earn the education courses they need (to become licensed teachers) while on the job," Rice explains.

In January, the program helped place 15 bilingual education teachers into the district.

The search is under way for a new donor to fund the district's Cohort Program, which has been dormant since the early '90s.

Back then, 35 district support staffers, mostly teachers' aides already working in classroom, obtained their teaching credentials and were rehired by the district as full-fledged teachers.

Eventually, CCSD hopes it won't have to look any further than its own schoolyards to find teachers.

Besides working to boost the memberships of middle and high school chapters of the Future Educators of America, the district is planning a magnet school dedicated to priming potential teachers. Tentatively called the Teacher Education Academy, it's to open next fall on the Clark High School campus. Organizers are researching magnet teaching programs already in place in high schools around the country.

Though the number of students able to participate in the program has not been determined, areas of study may include educational psychology and the use of computers in education.

"We want to find those kids when they're young," Rice says, "and give them a focus and give them a vision of what could be."