By Monday’s deadline, 404 candidates applied for 29 jobs that will be open at the start of the second semester.

As a large district, CMSD often has vacancies in the middle of a school year. But the large response signals the start of a “different era,” Chief Talent Officer Lora Cover said.

“It shows that people are interested in Cleveland and what’s happening in our schools,” she said.

The hiring is just a preliminary round. With another wave of retirements and other departures on the horizon, the District is recruiting aggressively and expects to add as many as 350 new teachers for the 2014-15 school year.

This is the second go-around for the Teach Cleveland recruiting campaign, which promotes the District’s sweeping reforms and the region’s renaissance.

CMSD launched Teach Cleveland before this school year in response to the first large-scale demand in a long time. The District ultimately hired 232 teachers.

Recruiters are seeking to fill high-need areas like special education, math, science and bilingual education.

They also are placing emphasis on recruiting diverse educators, specifically focusing on recruitment of black and Latino teachers, to better represent the CMSD student population.

CMSD has more than 2,800 classroom teachers, two-thirds of whom are white, while two-thirds of the nearly 39,000 students are black. Latinos account for 14 percent of the enrollment but make up only 4 percent of teachers.

The percentage of new applications submitted by teachers of color was nearly double that of last spring. Of the 404 applicants, 51 percent are white, 40 percent are black, 5 percent are Latino and 4 percent are Asian.

About three-fourths of the applicants are women. Seven percent are from outside Ohio.