Wooing teachers to Vegas

Benjamin Grove

Sunday, July 11, 1999 | 9:21 a.m.

Clark County schools interviewer Carol Blount has seen the future of teaching up close.

Between March and June, Blount welcomed 11 applicants a day to the round table in her cramped interview room. She insists it never got dull.

"My questions are the same, but the personalities and the responses are different," Blount, a semi-retired district veteran with a soft voice, said. "I've had them from Maine to Washington, from Montana to Florida, Alaska and Hawaii. The farthest was Guam."

The Clark County School District is now deep into teacher recruiting season for the 1999-2000 school year.

Officials for the fastest-growing metropolitan school district in the nation say they need 1,500 to 1,600 new teachers this year. As of this week, officials had hired 911.

Local recruiters have made a science out of wooing teachers to Las Vegas.

In recent years, the district has used cutting-edge technology and tireless recruiting campaigns that span 42 states -- focusing their attention in a number of Eastern and Midwestern states where the weather is cold and teaching jobs are scarce. (Interviewers stop everywhere but Alaska, Florida, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Vermont and West Virginia.)

Clark County is now one of the most aggressive teacher-recruiting machines in the nation.

School Board President Ruth Johnson said, "I attend conferences and I get a lot of people who ask, 'How do you hire so many teachers?' You're carnivorous. You're hiring away our teachers.' "

About 700 teachers are needed this year to fill new positions at the district's eight newest schools, set to open in August. Another 800 or 900 will replace retirees and those who left for other reasons.

"Teacher recruitment has become a major issue nationwide, particularly in fast-growing urban districts," said Segun Eubanks, a spokesman for the National Education Association, the largest teacher union in the nation with 2.4 million members. "They are the ones on the front lines of dealing with this problem."

Nationwide, school districts will need to hire 2.2 million teachers in the next decade, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Eubanks said large urban school districts are scrambling for applicants even though there are still more teachers than teaching jobs in the United States.

Eubanks said colleges of education have been slow to prepare students for the realities of urban classrooms. Many urban schools deal with higher numbers of discipline-problem students and students who speak different languages or who have learning disabilities.

Some graduates never find their way to classrooms, opting out of the teaching profession altogether.

Another reason: True shortages of special education, math, science, technology and bilingual teachers plague districts nationwide. Many districts are also fishing in limited pools of minority teachers.

Clark County officials also compete with districts that offer a host of incentives.

Some Mississippi districts offer teachers money to pay off student loans. In Baltimore, officials offer money for the down payment on homes. Washington, D.C., schools offer a $1,000 signing bonus and $500 moving expenses. In Massachusetts it's a $20,000 bonus over three years for some new hires.

"We don't have a lot to offer," Johnson said. "Except that after a month you've got seniority because 100 people were hired behind you."

Las Vegas officials also point to low starting salaries. Clark County now pays beginning teachers $26,321, several thousand below the state and national average.

"That doesn't play well for us," Johnson said.

Salary negotiations have already begun between the local teachers union and district officials. State lawmakers did not allocate money this year for teacher pay raises.

Teachers' union negotiator John Jasonek said the union was taking a "less rigid, more free-flowing" approach to the bargaining session this year, with hopes of avoiding hostile talks. Last year, an arbitrator was called in for the first time to settle differences between the teachers and the district.

"Our intent is not to conduct negotiations in typical labor management style," Jasonek said. "It just isn't productive to have both sides passing proposals back and forth and getting nowhere."

Meanwhile personnel director George Ann Rice plunges ahead with her recruiting effort.

Her office has become a hiring war room. Every day a new stack of 20 or 30 resumes lands on her desk -- the day's best prospects.

"I was talking to a legislator from Arizona who says, 'You hear that sucking sound -- that's our water and our teachers going to Nevada,' " Rice said, smiling, delighted with the comment.

Rice directs an array of innovative hiring methods. Among them: broadcasting live teleconferences to college auditoriums full of education majors, dispatching interviewers around the country and posting recruitment signs at McCarran International Airport.

"Three million people pass through that airport each year -- if one half of 1 percent of them are teachers, that's a whole new pool," she said.

Last year the district hired 1,836 teachers -- 706 right out of college. Among them was Robyn Lemon, 25, recently named one of five New Teachers of the Year in Clark County. She teaches music at year-round Mike O'Callaghan Middle School.

Her advice to new recruits: seek advice from other teachers at your school and accept that you will make mistakes so you learn from them.

"The best thing you can do," the band director said, "is keep them playing so they don't have a chance to talk."