Schools lure 'best'

"They look at the dollars and say, 'Whoa, I could be making that much?' " Wasden said, adding about 40 retirees were hired for positions before the letters went out. "(We benefit from the) wealth of experience and expertise they can bring to our system, and they can benefit from it financially."

The law requires retirees wait six months before returning to the school district from which they retired, or go to a different school district — which maybe half of Jordan's brand new retirees are doing now, said Laura Black, executive director of the Jordan Education Association teachers union.

Jordan still is looking to hire 40 more teachers — the rest of the 500 to 600 positions have been filled, Wasden said. Year-round schools will start school next week with 12 to 15 long-term substitutes and temporary teachers whose jobs don't start elsewhere until the fall.

"We're not panicked," Wasden said. "We're just going to continue to work carefully and methodically to get high-quality people to teach our students."

Elsewhere, Granite reports an elementary-teacher shortage. While it has about 70 applicants for 13 openings, odds are those candidates have applied elsewhere, McNeill-Waters said. Last year, it had 200 elementary applicants to choose from,

"Even if the applicant pool is larger than the collective openings in all the districts, it's an issue of quality," district spokesman Randy Ripplinger said.

Alpine District officials, who expect to hire about 400 teachers this summer, have struggled finding good high school math and science and special education candidates. Their shortages, however, are typical, and mostly attributed to growth: Enrollment has risen from 48,000 to 54,000 students in the past five years.

"We probably have 1,500 applications still in the drawers downstairs. . . . But we do anticipate having to seek out applications," district spokeswoman Jerrilyn Mortensen said.

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Contributing: Laura Hancock

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E-MAIL: jtcook@desnews.com