But what remained unclear yesterday was precisely how many teaching vacancies the board had to fill - because of retirements and the increase in student enrollment - and how many excess teachers were available.

As an employee for 29 years, he is also dismayed that the pact gives individual schools the option to overlook an applicant's seniority when filling a teaching vacancy.

In previous papers, the editors had written about hot-button issues like filling teaching vacancies based on seniority, a policy that Mr. Lasher had opposed in a signed column.

As a result, professors from North Carolina Central University have been brought in to fill the teaching vacancies.

And 128 teaching vacancies remain, mostly in hard-to-fill subjects like speech therapy.

"He mentioned only that there would be several teaching vacancies once the current session ends," Spock said.

"If it were, we would be able to fill all the teaching vacancies."

Most, he said, would return to the classroom and fill some of the more than 90 teaching vacancies that the district expects in September.

Mr. Klein expects to have as many as 11,800 teaching vacancies this fall, partly because he anticipates an unusually large number of retirements.

And so the county has 14 applicants for each teaching vacancy, while Baltimore City has two, and winds upoffering two-thirds of them jobs - the kind of hiring ratio you'd expect at a McDonald's.