Teacher void starting to fill

By Emily Richmond

Monday, July 16, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

The goal of staffing classrooms with full-time teachers before the school year begins - a chronic summertime struggle in Clark County - is suddenly looking more attainable.

In June the Clark County School District faced more than 1,200 teacher vacancies.

That number has been cut by more than half, to 565 .

One of the reasons: Teachers are losing their jobs elsewhere and coming here for work.

There's so much interest in teaching in Las Vegas that recruiters are adding interview appointments on weekends.

"We're trying not to waste a single minute," said Martha Tittle, the district's chief human resources officer.

The district requires more than 18,000 teachers to staff 336 schools, including nine new campuses, and typically needs to hire about 3,000 new teachers every year to staff new schools and replace people who have retired, relocated or been promoted to administration.

When the last school year began , the district was short more than 400 teachers - about 100 more than in previous years - and had to hire long-term substitutes.

And the situation looked even more glum this spring. In March, the district had received only about half the number of applications it had received the previous March. Officials blamed weak housing markets elsewhere - fewer people wanted to move if they couldn't sell their homes at decent prices.

And then Clark County started capitalizing on teacher layoffs elsewhere. Recruiters were dispatched to Detroit, for instance, after hundreds of teachers were fired there. Exactly how many teachers have been gleaned from the Motor City won't be known until this fall when there's been time to analyze the data, said Emily Aguero, director of recruiting for the School District.

The district even advertised in USA Today during Memorial Day weekend, hoping to get the attention of teachers vacationing here and reading the newspaper in their hotel rooms.

It might have helped. In June the number of applicants increased more than 10 percent compared with the previous June.

At the district's personnel offices on East Flamingo Road, interviews are being held every 30 minutes, beginning at 8 a.m. , Monday through Friday. Saturday sessions are being held several times a month.

For rookie teachers, the hiring drill concludes with fingerprinting - by scanning, not smudgy ink - at the Police Services building around the block, to facilitate background checks.

Among th ose being fingerprinted the other day was Laura Botsis, who will teach kindergarte n . "Once I'm finished here I think I'm good to go," she said, hardly containing her excitement.

Botsis spent two years as a substitute teacher in Clark County schools before earning a long-term assignment working with gifted and talented students. A full-time teacher encouraged her to enroll in a district-sponsored program that helps individuals who already have college degrees complete the necessary education classes and fast-tracks their training to be licensed as teachers. Botsis, who majored in business at Michigan State University, has been hired by Paradise Elementary School on the UNLV campus.

The district also recruits graduates from UNLV's College of Education. Of the 259 students in the program this year, 233 have applied for district jobs and 101 have been hired. Typically more than 90 percent of the UNLV students find positions in the district.

But those statistics, no matter how encouraging, aren't making the wait any easier for Crystal Armstrong, who graduated from UNLV this spring with a bachelor's degree in early childhood education. She hopes to teach kindergarten or first grade in Clark County, but has not landed a job. She keeps hearing about the district's teacher shortage and wonders why her phone isn't ringing.

"I know I have to be patient," Armstrong said. "My professor told me I may not hear anything until August."

In fact, the district has plenty of applicants for positions in the lower grades. The most vacancies are in the middle and high schools, in subject areas such as special education (where there are 169 openings), math and science.

With the public spotlight on the district's teacher shortage, human resources boss Tittle said she can understand the frustration of applicants waiting for calls. But despite the shortage, the district cannot veer from the state's licensing requirements for teachers or loosen its own standards for applicants, Tittle said.

"We still want the absolute best person for every classroom," Tittle said.

One source of confusion - and frustration for some out-of-town applicants - is Nevada's limited reciprocity with other states when it comes to licenses. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, each state must require its teachers to be "highly qualified." But the definition varies from state to state.

And, the Nevada Education Department, which sets the requirements and issues the credentials, does not automatically accept teacher licenses from other states. That can mean educators face expensive and time-consuming hurdles to relocate.

Tittle said one of her long-term goals is to smooth out the licensing problems.

"If a person has been teaching in another state in an accredited, reputable public school system for three years or more, and that can be validated, perhaps there should be a route for them to come to Nevada " without requiring additional testing, Tittle said.

To work for the School District, individuals must be eligible for a state license, and be either a U.S. citizen or legal resident.

Special three-year visas were approved for the 120 international teachers the district hired in 2005 and 2006 as part of a recruiting drive abroad. However, the district cannot sponsor individual applicants from foreign countries, Tittle said.

For more information about employment opportunities in the Clark County School District, go to http://ccsd.net/jobs .