With Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools warning of layoffs, teachers are asking why a national nonprofit group is setting up shop in Charlotte this spring and hiring a $70,000-a-year coordinator to recruit up to 100 teachers annually for local schools.

The group, called The New Teacher Project, says it operates in more than two dozen cities, helping school systems end educational inequality by recruiting effective teachers. It finds career-changers from other professions and trains them to work in low-income schools.

The group is advertising for a coordinator in Charlotte who will start working in CMS office space as early as April.

It remained unclear late Monday whether the arrangement costs CMS anything.

CMS, which is facing a budget gap of as much as $100 million, has warned that it might have to lay off 600 of its 8,565 teachers. The head of one local teachers' group said it makes no sense for district leaders to be talking about hiring new teachers when current teachers might be losing jobs.

"It's like they're talking out of both sides of their mouth," Mary McCray, head of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Association of Educators.

But CMS spokeswoman LaTarzja Henry said CMS is in a partnership with The New Teacher Project to help plug vacancies in hard-to-fill subject areas such as math, science and teaching exceptional children.

She said CMS still has vacancies in those areas, despite the fact that so many laid-off teachers are looking for jobs. Nearly 100 math and science teachers have left CMS of their own accord since last July, she noted. As of Monday, CMS had 16 math and eight science vacancies.

Told the new teachers will only fill posts for which CMS can't find candidates, McCray replied: "I don't believe that. I have met any number of (critical needs) teachers looking for positions."

She said CMS laid off some math and science teachers, and those teachers should be hired back before any new teachers get jobs.

Henry said CMS is working with the New Teacher Project because it has expertise in finding nontraditional candidates for the tough-to-fill jobs. It gives them intensive training, but the group says it requires candidates to show they can improve achievement among poor and minority students as a pre-condition of winning a license.

CMS has lost more than 400 of its almost 9,000 teaching jobs in 2010-11. The system already has been getting questions from teachers about Teach for America, the nonprofit program that trains high-achieving college graduates to work in low-income schools. CMS has about 250 Teach for America cadets assigned for this school year.