By LISA FERGUSON

Tiffany Stout is not yet sure how she'll put to use the elementary education degree she graduated with earlier this month. She is considering one option, although not too seriously.

"I was telling my husband the other day, 'Do you think I can sell my degree on eBay?' " she says, chuckling at the thought of how an online description for it might read: "Teaching degree and license -- never used, still in package."

The idea of auctioning her degree to the highest bidder may be extreme (and probably illegal), but it's easy to empathize with Stout and scores of other frustrated education professionals throughout Clark County who -- in the face of budget-related program cuts, potential pay reductions and looming layoffs -- are struggling to secure jobs or maintain their current employment at area schools and universities.

Earlier this month, Nevada legislators approved higher than expected funding for education. As a result, the Clark County School District should receive $250 million more for the 2011-'12 school year, lessening the need for teacher layoffs, while maintaining current class sizes and restoring some counselor and support staff positions.

The district will, however, still experience a $150 million gap in its budget for next year that may be closed by freezing some salary increases and through other budget-reducing measures. Some 600 administrative and support staff positions are facing elimination.

While the news is good for the district and students, it may not prove very helpful to educators like Stout. She spent the last four years earning her degree at a local University of Phoenix campus, juggling her studies with her longtime day job as a teacher's assistant at a Las Vegas private school. After graduation, she says she expected to easily land a gig teaching for the Clark County School District or at an area private school.

Despite having filled out numerous of applications and interviewed at various schools, Stout has yet to receive a job offer -- and isn't confident one is forthcoming.

"I anticipated that … there would be, just as there has been in years past, so many teaching positions that you'd kind of have your pick of the bunch." What she says she's found is "no teaching positions at all."

Times remain tough for some education professionals, a fact not lost on Bill Garis, acting chief human resources officer for the Clark County School District, whose office is charged with keeping the district's approximately 18,000 employees informed about employment situations and options.

"It's difficult for people to know right now what their status is going to be," he explains.

It may surprise some to learn that the Clark County School District is still hiring teachers, mostly in specialized areas such as special education and related services, including occupational and speech therapy. There are also nonteaching jobs waiting to be filled, including school nurses and some high-level administrative positions. Descriptions of available jobs can be found on the district's website, CCSD.net.

"We do have open positions, which to the public is hard to understand, but there are some very hard positions to fill that remain vacant,'' Garis explains.

He says he feels especially bad for newly minted teachers like Stout.

"Those who started their degrees four years ago and now they're graduating in elementary education this year," he says, "in terms of future opportunities in teaching, right now for Clark County School District, it's really difficult to say."

In any case, count on fierce competition for open positions. Applicants who "are science or math or special education (teachers), they've got a better chance" at landing a job with the Clark County School District than, for example, an elementary or secondary-education teacher whose specialty is physical education or social studies, Garis explains. "We don't typically have any difficulty filling those positions. Even in good times, those are very competitive areas."

It's a similar hiring situation at area charter schools, which are federally funded and accredited institutions sponsored by the Clark County School District. Such schools operate more autonomously than traditional public schools but are held to a higher level of accountability when it comes to increasing student achievement.

Dr. Michele Robinson is superintendent of schools for Odyssey Charter Schools in Las Vegas, which recently completed its 12th year of operation and boasts a student body of nearly 1,500 students in grades kindergarten through 12.

"We're hiring right now the same way I think the district is hiring, and at any public school, and that is just those high-needs positions," Robinson says, explaining that the school recently attempted to fill a speech pathologist position. "The (applicant) pool is so shallow," she contends.

That's not necessarily been the case at local private elementary and secondary schools, universities and trade and technical schools, where administrators say the abundance of qualified, experienced educators in the local job market has been a boon when it comes to hiring for their classrooms.

Four new teachers were recently added to the 150-member staff at Las Vegas Day School, where the focus recently has been on expanding the campus' middle school program. Judy Meese is admissions director and parent liaison at the private school, which opened in 1961 and has 900 students in its preschool through eighth-grade classes.

"We've always been choosy" when it comes to hiring educators, she says, explaining that Las Vegas Day School has previously hired retired Clark County School District teachers who decided they "were not ready to give up their careers yet. We've gotten some amazing teachers from that."

The current influx of teachers to the local job market has "actually been a benefit for us," Meese says. "We're really making sure that we get a good fit for what we're looking for.

"If you've worked for the Clark County School District for that long, you've had so many amazing experiences," Meese contends. Although some of those former teachers were "sad to leave the district," she says, "they've got a nice set up" at Las Vegas Day School. "I think they're very pleased that they found us."

Growth is also on the agenda at Touro University Nevada, a private, not-for-profit university with 31 campuses worldwide, including one in Henderson that's home to more than 1,700 students and 260 employees.

"We've got a number of faculty positions that we need to fill" at the local campus, says Senior Provost and Chief Executive Officer Michael Harter. "We don't have any positions that have been removed because of the budgetary problems that our colleagues at UNLV and Nevada State (College) and College of Southern Nevada have experienced."

Touro University Nevada is looking to fill numerous positions in several areas of study, including osteopathic manipulative medicine, basic sciences, nursing and occupational and physical therapy. Job descriptions and application information are available on the school's website, tun.touro.edu/. Given the medical nature of Touro University's courses, special training, degrees and job experience are prerequisites for many of the teaching positions.

"There are some candidates out there that wouldn't normally be out there without the economic downturn and losing positions at other universities," Harter explains of the applicant pool. "There are also some people taking retirement buyout incentives and then looking at a place like Touro as an opportunity to continue their career."

Additionally, he says, the university is "recruiting people who have a research background, so that they can begin doing research with us. … They bring skills in to us along with being able to function well in the classroom."

Teachers are also in demand at The Learning Center, which opened in Las Vegas 26 years ago and offers students information technology, also known as IT, computer training.

The school's president, Linda Montgomery, says job applicants are plentiful these days. "We would be looking for an individual who has prior teaching experience, and they would have to have the IT certification for the subject matters that they would be teaching," she explains.

Montgomery says she can afford to be choosy when it comes to hiring educators. "In years past, we found that we would have to grow our own instructors, and spend a lot of time developing and mentoring and so forth." That's not the case any longer. "There are a lot of candidates."

Laurie Clemens echoes that sentiment. The school director for the Las Vegas Professional Institute of Technology and Accounting Software says there's been no shortage of candidates for her to meet with while searching for instructors to teach courses in accounting, computer graphics and Web design, among others.

"I've been in this industry for almost 20 years, and I've never seen the (applicant) pool this big," Clemens says.

"Our instructors have to have at least two years of experience in the field that they are teaching," she explains. "If they come to us from a college or a school system, that's even better because they've had a lot of experience with teaching."

Clemens recalls a recent experience she had with a pair of applicants who were competing for the same instructor position.

"I have a person who's been an educator and she's really good with the educational side of things, but she's not really done as much of the (computer) software side of things," she explains. The other applicant had more experience in the business world, "but she's never been a formal teacher."

Clemens says her ideal applicant is one who has "that technical ability along with the instructional" experience.

For that reason, she urges job-seeking educators to include any previous business-related experience they may have with their teaching credentials on resumes in an effort to stand out from the crowd.

"There's a lot of great people coming through here," she says.