Booming Vegas needs teachers

The district has 300,000 pupils, and 528,000 are expected by 2018.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LAS VEGAS -- Retired as a management consultant and eager to launch a new career, Paul DeBruyne got certified as a teacher last year but could not find an opening anywhere near his hometown of Reading, Pa.
So at age 61, the affable, silver-haired DeBruyne has just moved to Las Vegas, where he is teaching English to sixth-graders at a school so new that hundreds of boxes of books and band instruments were still sealed on opening day recently. "Sure, I would have liked to stay home," he said, "but the opportunity was here."
Dominic Bailey, 47, was watching a Pistons playoff game on television in his Detroit home last spring when a recruiter from Las Vegas called. Facing a layoff notice in a city school district with a declining enrollment, Bailey, a retired Air Force veteran, said yes to a job teaching language arts to fifth-graders.
Bailey is also working at a new school, Liliam Lujan Hickey Elementary, set on a ridge at the northeast tip of Las Vegas, where the desert gives way to a chocolate-brown ridge of mountains.
And Albert Cabreira, 37, was 7,000 miles from Las Vegas when the recruiter came knocking in February -- in Manila, Philippines. Making a painful but financially rewarding decision, with his pregnant wife staying behind in the Philippines, Cabreira flew to Las Vegas last month and reported for duty in the special-education department at Paradise Elementary School.
Desperate need
All three teachers were enticed through a massive recruiting drive by Las Vegas' Clark County School District, the nation's fifth-largest with 300,000 pupils and one of its fastest-growing.
With 12 new schools opening this year -- and at least 138 more needed in coming years for a student population expected to mushroom to at least 528,000 by 2018 -- Las Vegas has put the word out with advertisements across the United States and in several other countries: Teachers wanted.
"It's getting to where the principals don't interview the teachers, the teachers interview the principals," joked Hickey Principal David Harcourt, who has made three recruiting trips to his native Midwest in the last year. "The competition is fierce."
Facing acute shortages in math, science, bilingual education and special education for children with developmental disabilities, Las Vegas hired 51 teachers this year from the Philippines and 14 from Spain, school officials say.