Tiverton Citizens for Change

You may have heard that the Rhode Island Superior Court has found in favor of the East Providence School Committee with regard to its unilateral imposition of budget-saving terms on the teachers’ union. Three consequences of the ruling have particular relevance for Tiverton:

1. Justice Silverstein emphasized that Rhode Island law forbids teacher contracts from extending beyond three years’ duration.
2. When a contract has expired it has, well, expired and has no legally binding force.
3. Rhode Island law requires school districts to maintain balanced budgets, and the remuneration of employees cannot be presumed to take precedence over other expenditures.

Number 1, it seems to me, means that the union’s gotcha, last August, by which it claimed that it didn’t need to renegotiate its contract for this school year (and, moreover, avoided higher health care coshares) had no basis in the law. If the district’s attorney, Stephen Robinson, wasn’t aware of this consideration, then he should be replaced at first opportunity. If the school committee opted not to pursue it, then that decision should be added to the evidence that they should all be replaced, as well.

Combining numbers 2 and 3, the lesson for Tiverton is that the financial town meeting (FTM) can set the district’s budget and empower the school committee to unilaterally extract the required savings from the unions. To put it bluntly, in ongoing negotiations, the School Committee should take the Budget Committee’s recent vote to place a leveled budget on the docket for the FTM as a reason to require a 5-6% reduction in the salary/health benefit line items of its contracts. If the union does not agree, and if the FTM does not produce a much larger pool of money for the schools, the School Committee should declare negotiations at an impasse and impose the necessary savings.

If the School Committee agrees to a more conciliatory contract prior to the FTM, it will be evidence that its members wish to lock the town into giving teachers’ pay priority over services, programs, and facilities. All of the talk about taxpayers’ attacks on kids will be so much vile rhetoric, because the committee will have been the one to determine that the students should be squeezed to compensate for revenue shortfalls.