Four principals and three administrators from the Clark County School District boarded a plane bound for the Philippines earlier this month with a clear mission in mind: Find teachers.

The trans-Pacific journey brought them to Manila, one of the world’s largest cities where teachers’ starting salaries can be as low as $5,000 per year. The meager earnings mean the lure of a significantly larger paycheck can entice Filipinos to leave their native country and fill much-needed teaching positions in places such as Las Vegas. The base salary for new teachers in Clark County is $40,900.

“It’s like winning the life lottery for them,” said Michael Gentry, a consultant working with the school district as its chief recruitment officer.

It’s also a win for the school district, which scrambles to fill a large number of teacher vacancies each year, especially within special education. As of last week, the district had 799 open positions for the upcoming school year — down from 1,087 vacancies at the same time last year.

A large chunk of the open positions are in Title 1 schools, which receive extra federal funding because they contain large numbers of economically disadvantaged students, Gentry said. Among the vacancies, 277 are for elementary positions and 305 are for special education teachers. The district is opening six new elementary schools next school year, hence the need for more kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers, he said.

Gentry considers special education the trouble spot, as it has been for years both in Las Vegas and across the country, because his candidate pipeline for those jobs is closer to 200 applicants.

“Even if they were all great, we don’t have enough to cover the positions we have open,” he said.

Grappling with the chronic shortage, the district has resurrected a recruitment program that provides J1-visas to educators from other countries who are willing to work in Las Vegas for three years. The cultural-exchange program has been dormant since 2005, when the district hired 49 Filipino teachers to beef up staffing during Southern Nevada’s rapid growth period, Gentry said. Forty-three of those teachers stayed the entire three years, and several remain in the district to this day.

The school district recruits from the Philippines because the island nation’s teachers tend to have credentials that meet Nevada’s standards — at least a bachelor’s degree, if not more advanced education — and many speak English, Gentry said. Plus, there’s the economic advantage: Clark County pays significantly more.

“Of the six that left, three of them left because of homesickness,” he said, referring to the 2005 cohort. “And three left because they couldn’t do the job.”

Gentry considers those good odds and hopes to have the same success this time. The Clark County group interviewed 240 teachers over a three-day period in the Philippines at the beginning of April, he said. Of those candidates, the district has hired 78 special education teachers to help address the shortage.

The Filipino teachers are expected to arrive toward the end of June, assuming they don’t hit any glitches during the visa process. School officials planned a week of “intensive classroom training” in July to teach them the techniques and requirements of being a special education teacher in Clark County, Gentry said. Their summer training also will include shadowing special education teachers to get a better sense of teaching routines, procedures, classroom management, verbal de-escalation tactics and individualized education plan (IEP) development.

On top of that, the district will introduce them to the Filipino community in Las Vegas and  provide new teacher supports, which includes everything from meet-ups to advice about good restaurants.

“I lived and worked in four different countries, and I know how difficult it is when you hire in,” Gentry said. “That’s not a comfortable feeling. I want to make sure we go over and beyond to give every bit of knowledge.”

Joseph Morgan, who coordinates UNLV’s special education program, said the district must think outside the box — like it’s doing with the recruitment abroad — to fill teaching vacancies at a time when the the supply of educators isn’t meeting demand.

The number of college students enrolled in education-degree programs dropped 35 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to a report released in September by the Learning Policy Institute, which conducts research to improve education policy and practices.

But there’s another startling trend that’s affecting the teacher marketplace: Roughly 8 percent of educators leave the profession each year, many before the age of retirement, the report notes. The reasons for their departures vary but include dissatisfaction with school leadership, not enough decision-making autonomy, little time for collaboration, increased testing demands and overwhelming workloads, among others.

“If we’re not willing to step out a little bit, we’ll always be behind the eight-ball on the shortage,” Morgan said. “The alternative is finding long-term substitutes to fill classroom vacancies.”

Tara Kini, director of state policy for the Learning Policy Institute, applauded Clark County for thinking creatively in recruiting abroad but cautioned the district about relying too heavily on teachers who may not stay past those three years.

“Teacher churn is a real concern,” she said. “Recruiting-abroad districts need to be conscious and supportive of teachers who will stay for an extended period of time.”

Gentry said the district will be monitoring how the Filipino teachers fare in the Las Vegas-area classrooms. He plans to survey principals for feedback several months into the school year before determining whether to recruit more teachers from the Philippines.

The recruitment abroad only represents a small part of the district’s hiring strategy, though.

Enrollment in teacher-licensure programs in Nevada has declined since the 2010-2011 academic year, although UNLV’s enrollment has remained fairly constant. Given the small pool of available Nevada graduates, the school district heavily recruits across the country.

So far this school year, the district has spent $228,541 on advertising for licensed classroom teachers and $116,620 on recruitment-related travel expenses. By the end of the summer, recruitment officials will have traveled to job fairs at more than 100 colleges and universities — including University of Arkansas, Boston University, University of Colorado, Wichita State University, Xavier University, Youngstown State University, Georgia Southern University and Texas State University, just to name a few destinations.

Gentry, who previously led the Las Vegas Sands’ recruitment efforts, is cautiously optimistic the widespread outreach — in person and through advertising and social media — will bring the number of vacancies down significantly by the first day of classes.

When the school year started in 2015, after all, the district had 881 open positions, he said. The number of vacancies is already lower and school officials still have four months left to recruit and hire.

“Zero (vacancies) is always the goal,” he said. “I am unwilling to admit that we’re not going to get to zero.”

Feature photo: Variety School students and staff dance to the music by Bruno Mars during class on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2017.  Photo by Jeff Scheid.