Thursday, April 28, 2005 | 9:45 a.m.
Within five years, Southern Nevada could face a crisis in recruiting teachers to fill local classrooms, outgoing Clark County School Superintendent Carlos Garcia said.
"Sooner or later there will be a huge crisis in recruiting teachers," Garcia said Wednesday, noting that the School District needs to attract 2,500 new teachers this year alone.
Part of the problem in trying to bring more teachers here is the rising cost of living in Las Vegas.
As housing prices soar in Southern Nevada, fewer teachers will have an incentive to relocate to the area, Garcia said on Wednesday's "Face to Face With Jon Ralston" Cox cable's Las Vegas One.
When pressed by Ralston, Garcia said the recruitment crisis would come within five years.
Earlier this month the 53-year-old Garcia announced he is leaving the helm of the school district on July 13 after five years.
Garcia explained that he had been receiving "incredible" offers for the past year or two until the textbook company McGraw Hill persuaded him to change his career course.
"I loved what I was doing," Garcia said.
The toughest part of his decision was leaving the people he worked with, the superintendent said.
However, Garcia said he was disappointed that he could not deliver more education funds into the schools.
The community and the state ought to be "outraged" that Nevada ranks 48th in the nation for per pupil-expenditures, Garcia said.
"I'll predict we'll rank 50th," he said.
In his first year with the Clark County School District, Garcia said, he along with the administrators and the School Board slashed $52 million from the School District budget. Yet the district went from 10 percent of students studying math and algebra at the time to more than 80 percent enrolled in those classes today, Garcia said.
Garcia said slower academic progress in Clark County schools is linked with the radical shift in population as growth continues and diverse ethnic groups arrive in Southern Nevada.
One out of every five students doesn't speak English, yet under President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, those students have to take a proficiency test in English within a year. Learning English or any other language takes three to eight years to accomplish, Garcia said.
"In one year, you don't learn enough English," Garcia said.
"If Albert Einstein arrived here when he was 18 years old, he would not have passed the proficiency exams," Garcia said, because Einstein did not speak English.
Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in Southern Nevada and they will need to learn English, he said.
"We're so darn ethnocentric; only English matters," Garcia said.
The School District mirrors society, Garcia said.
"You can't blame the schools for society's problems," he said.
The superintendent urged parents to become involved with the schools to "step up and take responsibility" for their children.
Garcia also said that problems such as violence in the schools and teenage pregnancy rates were going down.
The superintendent said he was disappointed that he could not do more to reduce the number of students in classrooms or win raises for teachers more than 2 percent or 3 percent a year.
State leaders are trying to keep state costs down, he said, and it is an "outright lie" that the state is throwing money into education.
"Everybody wants to be so darn politically correct," Garcia said. "We're in a cheap state, which doesn't want to make the tough decisions."
The first step the state could take is to expand all-day kindergarten classes statewide, he said. In a pilot program in Clark County, some kindergarten students were already reading by the end of the first semester.
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