George Ann Rice is Las Vegas’s chief teacher recruiter and she doesn’t miss a trick. Racking her brains to meet the insatiable demand for new teachers of the fastest-growing city in the United States amid the wave of patriotism stoked by September 11 last year, she hit upon the idea of targeting military personnel returning home from overseas. As well as sending mailshots to barracks and posting advertisements in newsletters, she enlisted teachers who have served in the armed forces to help twist the arms of other service personnel contemplating a career change.

Thinking outside the box is all in a day’s work for Ms Rice, who has to find 1,800 teachers annually for a pupil population expected to swell from 260,000 to 400,000 by 2009.

Clark County, the administrative district centring on Las Vegas, is home to 1.5 million people - and the number is steadily rising. Newcomers are drawn by abundant jobs, cheap housing, no income tax and balmy weather. Later this month, the school district (American parlance for education authority) will open 10 new schools; next year it plans a further 16, contributing towards a total of more than 60 planned between now and 2010. Since the early 1990s, education chiefs have been authorised to raise more than $4billion (pound;2.5bn) to fund the building of new schools.

`Targeting soldiers is just the latest in a long line of audacious, opportunistic and aggressive tactics that has earned Las Vegas a reputation as the most innovative classroom recruiter in the US.

“Clark County is leading the country in new ways of recruiting teachers.”

says Mildred Hudson, chief executive of Recruiting New Teachers Inc, a think-tank dedicated to looking at new ways of drumming up interest in the profession. “Many school districts use some recruitment strategies, but the genius of Clark County is that they are reaching into a variety of sources.”

And anyone is fair game. Las Vegas can count on only 600 new recruits a year from local teacher training colleges and universities, so it must look outside to make up the shortfall. The city’s status as a gambling and entertainment Mecca offers an unprecedented opportunity to spread the word to the millions of tourists. Out-of-towners stepping off their plane at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport are informed that: “Elvis has left the building - we now have a vacancy.”

Rice hits the road for much of the year, crossing 40 states in search of teachers, but her team doesn’t cut an indiscriminate swath. It does its homework to find the richest pickings and tailors the itinerary accordingly.

Most intelligence gathering is done on the Internet. In fact, the Web has emerged as the most powerful tool in the school district’s recruitment arsenal: it accounts for 95 per cent of applications. The man in charge of this is Greg Hallopoff, director of human resources technology and e-recruitment tsar. He tracks people who have filled out online “interest forms” expressing a desire to learn more about teaching vacancies in Las Vegas. He can thus pinpoint where recruitment efforts are likely to be most productive.

“If we find out we are not getting anything from Alabama we won’t go there,” says Mr Hallopoff.

Unlike the gaming tables and one-armed bandits of Las Vegas’s famous neon strip, nothing is left to chance on the Internet. Interviews in cities to be visited are arranged in advance. Under a partnership with a teacher recruitment website, local teachers who have posted their CV online are emailed and invited to show up for an interview at the hotel at which the the Clark County team is staying.

The online forms also serve as a means to pursue prospective job candidates more pro-actively. Mr Hallopoff has instituted a colour-coding scheme. All forms downloaded but not returned are coded blue and earmarked for a gentle email reminder. Once candidates fill out the interest form, provided they have the requisite qualifications, they proceed to an online application form. The final step is an interview. At full-tilt, interviews run eight hours a day at Clark County’s education offices.

By putting much of the application process online, officials say they have shrunk the turnaround time for vacancies from between four to eight weeks to an average of a fortnight - and where they need to be nimble with candidates who are looking elsewhere, to just 24 hours. “We may not be the first choice, but we make the first offer - which people tend to go for,” Mr Hallopoff explains.

Clark County also looks to profit from lay-offs in other areas. “Our ears are everywhere. We get calls from teachers, administrators and businessmen,” says Ms Rice. “If they let 100 teachers go in Iowa, we schedule a trip.”

To close the deal, candidates who are offered a job are emailed by one of the school district’s business partners, who provides a glowing account of life in Las Vegas. If they accept, their spouse is immediately enrolled in an online job bank used by local employers to advertise openings. “Because we bring 70 per cent of our teachers in from outside, we have to get them to think of our state as home,” says Ms Rice.

Teachers arriving for the new term in the torrid August heat are treated to cool lemonade and cookies, and offered three nights free in a local hotel while they find their feet. Such niceties are important amid the staff retention crisis gripping American state schools. One in 10 new recruits quits within a year and, after five years, half are gone, says Hudson.

Nor is recruitment closer to home neglected. Under a strategy known as grow your own, prospective teachers are staked out among the parents of pupils attending local schools. Those who are suitably qualified are invited to enrol in teacher certification classes while their youngsters are at school. To date, 60 parents have signed up.

As recruiting teachers increasingly resembles a high-stakes crapshoot, the world’s gambling capital is doing its best to stack the deck in its favour.