School district wants UNLV to produce more teachers

Thursday, Sept. 3, 1998 | 10:44 a.m.

The Clark County School District is pleading with state university officials to expand its educational programming so that more teachers could be recruited locally.

"This is a life or death issue for us," Clark County School District Superintendent Brian Cram told members of a Board of Regents task force at its first meeting Wednesday. "If we have empty classrooms for lack of qualified teachers, we're in trouble."

Clark County hired more than 1,600 teachers for this school year to replace retirees and accommodate 11,000 additional students.

District officials recruited in 44 states, but were hampered by low starting salaries.

Cram has been pleading with UNLV to produce more teachers, reasoning that many of those graduates would want to remain in the Las Vegas area. As it stands, the district gets perhaps only one-fourth of its teachers from UNLV.

The Board of Regents of the University and Community College System of Nevada created the Regents Initiative for Teacher Education Task Force to develop a plan specifically aimed at putting more qualified teachers in Clark County classrooms.

The task force is scheduled to have a report ready by November.

Cram pointed out that the teacher shortage is not limited to Clark County.

"This is a statewide problem," he said, noting that smaller school districts that can't afford to go out of state to recruit their teachers get them from the larger districts.

Chancellor Richard Jarvis called for a second meeting of the task force -- tentatively scheduled for Oct. 13 -- that would be attended by representatives of UNLV, the community college, the school district and private educational institutions.

A number of ideas were put forth at Wednesday's meeting.

Cram said he would like to begin recruiting potential teachers from his own pool of employees.

"We have 20,000 employees in the district, half of them teachers," he said.

The rest are support personnel, such as secretaries, custodians, teachers' aides and bus drivers.

Cram said if a special program could be created, at either UNLV or CCSN, to give those support personnel the opportunity to become teachers, it would go a long way toward easing the teaching crisis.

President Richard Moore of the Community College of Southern Nevada said that CCSN has more non-traditional students than any other kind and proposed that the community college establish a four-year program for them leading to a teaching certificate or license.

UNLV President Carol Harter outlined a plan that eventually would create more than 1,600 teachers a year.

Regent Mark Alden said he thought Moore's plan should be looked at seriously. "But we want to make sure everybody meets the same academic parameters," Alden said.

Jarvis said he was excited by the proposals made by both Moore and Harter.

Harter's plan focused on enhancing three existing programs and four new ones.

The three existing programs include a four-year education degree, which turns out 300 teachers a year, and licensing of those with degrees in other fields, which turns out another 500 per year.

New programs would include a partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno, encouragement of students in other UNLV programs to complete a licensing program, and an initiative to get those with higher degrees to get licenses.

Cram said whatever methods are used to increase the number of available teachers, it must be done quickly.

"If your model doesn't work in one year, then we we need to go immediately to another way," he said.