Working long hours, Boccia—known at Valley High as Mr. Tony—is learning how to run his classroom via trial and error, one day at a time. At this point, his teaching methods may be more grounded in instinct than formal training: Boccia is not a fully licensed teacher—not yet at least. While he previously subbed in several classrooms in Las Vegas’s Clark County School District to make ends meet while working toward his Ph.D. in business, the only formal preparation he’s had to become a teacher was a semiweekly fast-track training program last summer.

The teacher shortage in the school district that includes Las Vegas is perhaps one of the worst in the country, mirroring a nationwide pattern in which students in high-poverty and high-minority areas experience the greatest teacher shortages. At the beginning of last school year, the district reported 900 vacancies, according to Mike Gentry, the district’s chief recruitment officer. In the summer leading up to this school year, the district had 700 unfilled teacher jobs. So the state and district are trying some creative—and highly controversial—strategies to draw teachers into the county’s rapidly diversifying and increasingly needy schools.

The biggest push by far happened early this year when Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval issued an emergency teacher-hiring regulation allowing school districts to issue provisional licenses to teachers who otherwise would not qualify to teach in Nevada schools. The regulation immediately raised concern that hundreds of subpar teachers would fill the vacancies. According to the Clark County human-resources department, however, the intent of the emergency regulation was to allow for the hiring of out-of-state teachers, a move that up until the signing of the Every Child Succeeds Act would have jeopardized Nevada’s ability to qualify for federal funds.

“It’s not like this regulation allowed nonqualified teachers to apply. In order to gain the provisional license, you have to be a licensed teacher in another state,” Gentry said. “There’s not a heck of a lot of difference between what one state does and doesn’t define as qualifications to become a teacher. It’s not like we’re saying: ‘Let’s bring this unqualified, non-degreed person over to Clark County to teach our students.’ Once the professional license is issued, there are specific things that teacher then needs to complete in order to comply. And if they don’t, they lose their provisional license and the deal is off.”

As a result, the emergency hiring directive—coupled with ongoing programs that allow schools to hire mid-career professionals like Boccia after prepping them at “lightning speed”—has allowed the district to fill more than half of its vacancies this school year. As of early November, Gentry said, 323 spots remain open.

Still, allowing non- or barely credentialed teachers to take over classrooms is worrisome to educators like Magdalena Martinez, the director of education programs for the Lincy Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “We can’t be in a rush to fill all our vacancies if we can’t fill them with quality teachers,” Martinez said. “There’s great concern, and it’s legitimate, that the district is under so much pressure to fix the teacher shortage.”