School district still needs to hire 600 more teachers

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 | 10:56 a.m.

The Clark County School District still needs to hire more than 600 additional teachers in the next month in order to have campuses fully staffed by the start of the new academic year.

The district plans to add a total of 2,000 new licensed personnel for the 2005-06 academic year. Teachers are scheduled to report for the first day of work on Aug. 15. The district will open 12 new campuses two weeks later, bringing the total number of schools to 313.

So far 1,858 new teachers have been offered positions and about 1,100 have accepted, said Lina Gutierrez, executive director of licensed personnel for the School District. The largest number of vacancies are, as usual, in the hard-to-fill subject areas such as special education and mathematics.

The pace of hiring will continue to accelerate over the next two weeks as telephone interviews are completed with out-of-state candidates, Gutierrez said. Once a prospective teacher's application has been approved by the central office it is added to an online database.

Principals can review candidates' interview scores, references and resumes for themselves and then make job offers.

Additionally, a new series of commercials encouraging people to sign up as substitute teachers were shot last week, Gutierrez said.

"The substitutes are our back-up," Gutierrez said. "Obviously we want to have a full-time teacher in every classroom possible."

Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association, said the Las Vegas Valley's soaring housing prices may be keeping some potential new teachers away.

"We're trying to work out some deals right now for reduced rental rates for teachers," Holloway said. "Of course, paying them a better wage would be a solution to the problem."

Not only are high real estate prices keeping some newcomers away, it's one of the reasons existing employees say they're leaving, Holloway said.

"The cost of housing has become a real problem for people looking to settle down," Holloway said. "It used to be that was a big benefit to moving to Las Vegas, but it's much more difficult now."

First-year teachers fresh out of college earn $28,491. They also receive a $2,000 signing bonus.

There are some pay increases coming for current and new teachers, Holloway said. The 2005 Legislature approved a 2 percent pay increase for the first year of the biennium followed by a 4 percent increase in the second year.

The new teachers' contract currently being negotiated with the district adds a 15th step to the salary pay scale, equaling another 2 percent raise for veteran teachers.

There are other details to the contract that Holloway said will please the district's teachers. However the specifics cannot be disclosed until the School Board approves the contract and it is ratified by a union vote, Holloway said.

"I think things are looking good," Holloway said.

The union had some other good news: Last week its membership roles registered the lowest drop in four years, Holloway said.

Just 185 teachers asked to drop their union memberships by the required deadline, compared with 199 requests in 2004, Holloway said. Total union membership was at 11,390, up from 10,619 in the prior year.

The union experienced its biggest drop ever in 2001 with 1,197 requests, Holloway said. Teachers pay annual dues of $625 each for membership.