The article below ran in the Las Vegas Sun today. Is it just an issue of teachers' pay or is it also how they treat teachers? Are abusive administrators driving out good teachers or is it the system itself?
The chronically teacher-starved Clark County School District is breaking into a nervous sweat. Through March it has received fewer than half the applications compared with the same period last year. The numbers, Superintendent Walt Rulffes said, "are not pretty."
The district received 575 applications through March from prospective teachers, compared with 1,277 in the same period the previous year. And this year's tally is barely one-third of the 1,514 applications received in the same period of the year before that.
The district's teacher needs are so great - because of growth, resignations and retirements - it could stand to hire 1,600 teachers tomorrow. The number of vacancies is expected to double over the summer, because teachers typically wait until the end of the school year to submit their notices of resignation and retirement. The district makes up for the shortfall - it started the school year short 400 teachers - by hiring long-term substitute teachers and forgoing new state-funded programs .
Rulffes said although the start of the 2007-08 school year is more than four months off, the early numbers concern him.
You can read the rest of the article here.
