School district administrators describe the situation as dire. “I could build 23 elementary schools today, and they would open up full and overcrowded,” Pat Skorkowsky, the superintendent of schools, told the Henderson Chamber of Commerce at a recent breakfast.

A few moments later, over coffee at the Sunset Station Hotel and Casino, he recalled the pangs of anxiety he felt when the breakfast opened with a developer boasting of his latest housing project. “Sometimes you don’t want to be a leading economic indicator,” Mr. Skorkowsky said.

The concern ricocheted among parents as they dropped off their children at Linda Rankin Givens Elementary School on a recent morning. Hule Johnson, 42, an accountant and father of two boys, said he had seen a precipitous decline in the quality of education over his years here; his son Jamie, 8, now comes home with questions about his homework. “How can they be involved with all these kids they have to handle every day now?” he asked.

To complicate matters, the enrollment surge comes during a national teacher shortage. The Clark County School District has 650 vacancies on its roster of 18,000 teaching positions. First-grade classes, which are supposed to have 16 students, often have 25, while some middle school classes have as many as 32. Elementary schools are 17.6 percent over capacity, according to district statistics.Tia Hartman, 29, said her daughter, Aria, 8, feels “lost in the crowd with all these kids.”

Still, for a community that has been battered by bad economic news — the collapse of the construction industry, record foreclosures, high unemployment — it is hard not to see this growth as a bit of good news.

Stephen Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the surge was a strong indicator that the recovery had taken hold. “We’ve been seeing a fairly strong population growth in the last couple of years,” he said. “The increase in enrollment in Clark County schools suggests that 2014 might now show an even stronger population growth.”

This region is caught in something of a vise. A $669 million school bond construction measure was defeated two years ago, dragged down in an atmosphere of economic despair. But the challenge of persuading retired residents to raise their taxes to build schools tends to discourage efforts to bring the measure back.