Teacher net: Program uses ‘misery index’ to lure potential educators to Clark County

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003 | 11:16 a.m.

When blizzards bury Buffalo, N.Y., or layoffs level Long Beach, Calif., the "misery index" built into the Clark County School District's teacher recruiting software kicks into action.

"We can check for applicants in areas where there's bad weather, economic downturns, a whole variety of quality-of-life elements," said Greg Halloposs, the district's director of e-recruiting and technology, who wrote the software for the human resources department. "When teachers are sick of shoveling snow, we send them an e-mail reminding them that it's warm and sunny here 300 days of the year. It sounds cruel that we call it the misery index, but in reality it's been a very effective tool for recruitment."

The district's use of technology -- and Halloposs' software in particular -- won praise this week from the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps urban schools recruit. It has also prompted visits from more than a dozen other school districts, including San Francisco; Los Angeles; Long Beach., Calif.; Omaha, Neb.; and Rochester, N.Y.

While most major school districts accept online applications, Clark County is believed to be the first to devise its own software using color coding to track potential candidates by a variety of factors, including experience, geographic location and specialty.

Halloposs said the district briefly considered selling the software program to another district when Hawaii's Education Department expressed interest. But after Hawaiian educators made five visits to examine the system and then balked at negotiating a price, Associate Superintendent George Ann Rice said she drew the line.

"At some point you have to say, 'Alrighty folks, that's it, the tours are no longer available,' " Rice said Monday. "There's professional courtesy, and then there's giving away trade secrets. And we're not going to do that."

The human resources office is busy enough recruiting the 1,600 new teachers needed by the district for each of the last three years without venturing into marketing, Halloposs said. And now several private companies have come up with versions of the software he began designing six years ago, using free programs downloaded from the Internet.

"It's not just the software," Halloposs said. "Having a dandy computer program won't mean a thing if you don't have the people to back it up. We have employees who enjoy the challenges of their work, which is why we're successful. That's a lot harder to bottle and sell."

The software has cut down on the amount of data entry needed on the district side. In a district where the starting pay lags that of neighboring states, that personalized touch can mean the difference between catching and losing a candidate, Rice said.

"We have more time to focus on the people instead of the paperwork," Rice said.

The color coding system tells personnel assistant Joye Locke who has submitted their applications, whose applications are in process and who has yet to start. The laggers are then sent an e-mail urging them to finish because the district is still interested.

Between August 2002 and August 2003, Locke handled 10,357 interest forms filled out online. Of those people, 7,517 were issued passwords for online applications, with 5,088 completing the process.

The software was crucial this summer after hiring was frozen for five weeks while the Legislature battled over education funding, Locke said. Once hiring resumed, the district was able to turn around applications in as little as 24 hours, Locke said.

The software also tells the district where its advertising is working and where it is lacking, personnel analyst Mary Lapsevich said. For example, since July nearly 1,000 people were redirected to the district's website after clicking on an advertisement at www.teachers-teachers.com.

"Before this, we had to put ads in all the newspapers and hope people saw them," Lapsevich said. "Now we can do much more targeted marketing, and the teachers get sent right to us. They don't have to call or write and wait for us to mail them a pamphlet."

Locke checks daily for clusters of teachers from the same geographic area filling out interest forms or requesting application help. That can indicate layoffs or teacher dissatisfaction in another state, giving the district time to ramp up its advertising campaign in that region.

"It sounds like dog-eat-dog, but in this environment it's what makes us successful," Rice said. "We get a head start on everyone else."

One of the districts taking note of that head start is Broward County, Fla. Ranked just ahead of Clark County as the nation's fifth-largest school district, Broward sent its human resources staff to meet with Rice last year.

While Broward uses techniques similar to Clark County's, it can't track online visitors geographically. That means Broward must rely on trade magazine reports, newspaper articles and word of mouth to keep abreast of potential teacher layoffs in other regions, said Hope Waldman, personnel administrator for the Florida school district.

"It certainly an advantage for (Clark County) if they don't have to wait to spot the trends," Waldman said.

Deborah Hirsh, chief human resources officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, paid a visit to Rice's office on Flamingo Road last year, hoping for tips for the nation's second-largest school district.

Los Angeles has since followed Clark County's lead and purchased an online application program, cutting their response time from six weeks for paper versions to just 24 hours, Hirsh said. That has freed up employees to spend more time on customer service, Hirsh said.

"Dr. Rice took such little resources and turned it into a huge advantage," said Hirsh, whose district hires 6,000 new teachers each year and has 750,000 students. "I came back from that trip convinced Clark County was a model for all of us to emulate."

With the new certification requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act shrinking the pool of qualified teacher applicants, speed is becoming an essential ingredient to successful recruiting, said Robert McCord, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"This is about competition," McCord said. "The district has applied sound technology to speed up the process, but also to make sure they don't lose sight of a single qualified candidate along the way."

Clark County is also doing a better job using technology to help teachers once an applicant becomes a new hire, McCord said. Prior to their start date, new employees receive regular e-mails detailing curriculum requirements, home loan and apartment rental opportunities and even details about a community job bank reserved for spouses and family members who are not teachers.

One successful applicant who appreciated the speedy process was Denise Doucet, who applied online in April from Vancouver and now works at Mojave High School.

Because Doucet is a special education teacher -- one of the hardest positions to fill -- her application was automatically flagged by the software and moved to a special "high priority" folder. Within 48 hours Doucet said she had been contacted by the district and was told her file would be available for principals to review in a week.

"On the seventh day exactly my phone rang at 7:30 a.m.," Doucet said Wednesday. "It was (Mojave Principal) Andre Denson offering me a job, and I took it. One, two, three, just like that."

School administrators in the district are also benefiting. Teddie Brewer, principal of Tom Williams Elementary School in North Las Vegas, said with a few clicks of her computer's mouse she can pull up any teacher's application, complete with college transcripts, references and the results of any district interviews. She can also search the district's database for applicants by experience, the grade level they prefer to teach and certification.

"Any time we can access information and don't have to make a physical trip somewhere else, that's a huge benefit," Brewer said. "I hired nine new teachers for this school year, and three of them I got just from using the online application materials."