In Vegas, recruiting teachers is a ruthless art

These varied and far-reaching efforts have earned Clark County a national reputation, says Mildred Hudson of Recruiting New Teachers Inc., a nonprofit think tank in Belmont, Mass. "If you look across the nation, you can see that St. Louis also recruits teachers from overseas and Savannah also has grow-your-own programs," she says. "But Clark County is cutting edge because it's trying to solve this problem ... with an unusually wide range of strategies."

Indeed, Clark County's prowess is legendary, says Stephanie Zuckerman-Aviles, career-development center director at Buffalo State College in New York. One example: After visits to regions like hers, recruiters play up the weather issue by e-mailing candidates to say it was hot and sunny when they returned to Nevada.

"Other recruiters used to sit there very passively at job fairs while people passed by their tables, but the Clark County group would arrive en masse, advertise before they came, make some noise," says Ms. Zuckerman-Aviles."

Job fairs remain an integral part of the push, but they're fast becoming old-fashioned in an era when 95 percent of the district's applications are accepted via the Internet. Rice believes Clark County is the first district in the nation to have a full-time "director of e-recruiting," Greg Halloposs, who has devised a computerized system for tracking prospective teaching candidates by color-coding.

"Green is the color of people who have asked for but never even opened the application," Rice says. "I can send an e-mail and say: 'You haven't opened your application yet! We're eager to help you!' "

If it sounds a bit like stalking, it is nonetheless necessary. To not keep after candidates is to risk losing out to other newly aggressive school districts in the West, including those in Arizona, southern California, and Colorado.

That might explain how Shannon Lahiff of Cleveland raced through the process. The recent graduate spent three months being rejected or ignored by dozens of Ohio school districts with few openings before phoning Clark County on May 10. By that afternoon, Ms. Lahiff had faxed her transcript and had a date on May 15 for a phone interview. Hours after that interview, she had a job offer. "I was very impressed," she says.

Clark County does have one significant competitive disadvantage: salaries. At $26,847 for a teacher fresh out of school, it is below the national average of $27,989 for the 1999-2000 year, the most recent data available. San Diego Unified School District, a major competitor, offers $33,903. To sweeten the deal, however, the Nevada Legislature provided for a one-time $2,000 signing bonus for out-of-state teachers. Rice's crew also reminds candidates that Nevada has a low cost of living.

Still, even with the myriad of programs, the district is likely to start the school year at least 100 teachers short in high-need areas such as special education and math.

That means Rice and her staff can never slow down. On a recent flight from New York to Las Vegas, Rice and another associate superintendent found themselves sitting on either side of a young couple. Recalls Rice: "Halfway through the flight, the other associate superintendent leans over to me and whispers, 'She's a social worker! I've got her!' And I whispered back, 'That's good, because he's a police officer, and I got him.' "

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