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Barrington teachers, school committee reach 3-year deal
01:00 AM EST on Friday, November 7, 2008
By C. Eugene Emery Jr.
Journal Staff Writer
BARRINGTON — The School Committee and the teachers union have agreed to a new three-year contract requiring most teachers to pay more for their medical insurance and raising pay by 2 to 2.95 percent annually.
The pact, which will not take effect until Sept. 1, also says that both sides will consider renegotiating salary scales if there is a severe cut in state aid.
Such talks would be designed to avoid layoffs or cuts in programs.
“We hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Patrick Sullivan, president of the 290-member teachers union, NEA Barrington. “Getting through these difficult times requires some collaboration with the administration, and that’s something we have always been receptive to.”
School Committee Chairman Patrick A. “Buzz” Guida said the agreement means Barrington teachers will be paying 20 percent of their health insurance premiums. “We believe that is the highest co-share in the state.”
Currently, only new teachers pay 20 percent. Those hired before Sept. 1, 2006, have been paying 15 percent.
With no education funding formula in the state, state law putting an increasingly restrictive lid on the amount of property tax money a community can raise and Rhode Island having the dubious distinction of the worst economy in the nation, “you have a perfect storm,” Sullivan said today (Friday).
Nonetheless, he said, “We felt this was something we could work with over the next three years.”
The union ratified the deal, with some dissent, on Oct. 30.
The School Committee approved the contract yesterday (Thursday) in a 4-1 vote. Member Jim Hasenfus abstained, saying he thought that the decision should be made by the incoming School Committee, which will have two new members. (Doris Eddins did not seek reelection and Deborah Thurston is stepping down.)
Guida said the agreement came after about ten weeks of negotiations. It is not unusual, he said, for Barrington to reach a deal with its teachers well before expiration of the existing pact.
For teachers in the first nine steps of the contract, the pay increase will be 2 percent in September, 2 percent a year later, and 2.5 percent in the final year. Last September, teachers got a 3 percent raise.
Workers in the top step, which represents more than half the teachers, will receive increases of 2.95 percent in each year of the deal. This year they received 3.55 percent.
Guida said the fact that more-experienced teachers will be paying more for their health insurance will chew up a good chunk of their raise.
“It almost brings the raise down to 2 percent,” he said.
The pay increase in Barrington will be in line with other communities, said Guida. “We looked at this in the context of where other districts are.”
The same was true of health insurance. Workers are paying 15 percent in East Greenwich, he said, while North Kingstown is going to 15 percent in two years and Newport will go to that level beginning in 2010. Some communities such as Scituate are staying at 10 percent, he said. Pawtucket teachers pay 5 percent of their health insurance premiums.
gemery@projo.com / 277-7442
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East Providence school board takes hard line in contract talks
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, November 9, 2008
By Alisha A. Pina
Journal Staff Writer
EAST PROVIDENCE — The School Department’s negotiating team is going pro this year.
Led by a new lawyer, a new superintendent and a new School Committee member, the team is more feisty, more focused and more determined than any this city has ever seen. It may well be the toughest bargaining team any teachers’ union in Rhode Island has ever faced.
The committee’s contract with the city’s teachers’ union expired on Halloween, but in negotiations that began in August the School Committee team has fought over everything from ground rules to financial concessions.
They haven’t budged on their demand that negotiations be open to the public — citing four other states where it’s legally required. In back-to-back weeks in September, they also filed two unfair labor practice complaints against the East Providence Education Association, which represents the city’s 500 teachers. The union is affiliated with the National Education Association Rhode Island, or NEARI.
They say this aggressiveness is critical to stop the financial bleeding in the school system which has a $4.2-million deficit — more than $3 million was rung up over the last year. And it’s still growing, they say, because of the terms of the last contract which the previous committee agreed to.
The School Department team’s get-tough approach has a growing fan club — nine school leaders from around the state recently issued a statement in support of the efforts here. Taxpayers at recent city meetings have also pledged their support.
Leading the charge are lawyer Daniel Kinder, Supt. Mario Cirillo and committeeman Anthony A. Carcieri.
Along with the skirmishes over ground rules, the negotiators also have disclosed their ultimate goal. The committee wants $3 million in annual concessions from the teachers, Carcieri says, adding that they aren’t bluffing or backing down. “The NEA has experienced hard-ballers who go around from city and town stepping on the retired librarians and school moms who join the School Committee to help and have little experience with contract negotiations,” Carcieri said. “They’re shaking down municipalities and taking them for more than they are worth.
“So what did we do? We went out and got ourselves an expert labor lawyer who knows the game in and out. I suggest other school departments do the same.”
ALTHOUGH HE denies being leader of the push for change, the East Providence School Department changed after Carcieri was appointed in March. Committee members Steven Santos and Robert Faria, who used to be on the losing end of split votes, were now having their suggestions — such as establishment of an anti-nepotism policy — approved.
The new majority sought new legal representation in June, picking Kinder a short time later, and hiring Cirillo and school Finance Director Jerome I. Baron. All three were Carcieri’s finds.
“This is not politics at all,” said Carcieri, 62, a retired real estate investor and father of a daughter with special needs. A distant cousin of the governor, Carcieri had never been on any elected or appointed boards previously.
“This is the end of the line. This is cleaning up a big mess that we inherited. I go in and I look at the situation. I have no ax to grind. I came in to make decisions, but it’s not like I am doing it all by myself….”
The six district negotiators are Carcieri, Faria, Baron, Kinder, Cirillo and Lonnie Barham, the department’s human resources director. They take direction from the entire School Committee and rely heavily on Kinder’s advice, which is at a “deeply discounted” rate of $195 an hour, Kinder said.
The lawyer, who has his own spokesperson, has done nothing but labor, employment and education law in his 30 years as an attorney. He says he has represented employers in more than 20 states and currently works for several Rhode Island school districts and communities including North Kingstown, Middletown, Barrington and Charlestown.
The school board expects to spend up to $300,000 for Kinder’s services this fiscal year. The majority say the figure is justified given their goal of saving $3 million in personnel costs. The first bill to the city totaled nearly $39,000 with 70 hours in August devoted to the teacher contract.
The negotiating team — with and without the rest of the School Committee — meets often to discuss the next steps to take. Nearly all the negotiators, and Santos, huddled around the long wooden desk in Cirillo’s office early Halloween morning. Carcieri had just finished a live interview on the John DePetro Show on WPRO-AM.
“People are all over this,” Carcieri said. “Every call was, ‘Hang in there….’ Fifty-two teachers said they would love to have a job in EP.”
Said Santos, “We’re moving in the right direction. It’s supposed to be about the school kids and the buildings are falling in around them. It’s tough to learn when you are in a lousy environment.”
Carcieri said that’s because the union is getting more than 70 percent of the department’s money. He said the most recent contract had raises — 5 percent in the last school year — that the city couldn’t “afford then and certainly can’t afford now.”
He characterized the teachers as “living large.” He said he has nothing against them and they have provided his daughter with “excellent care” over the years. Carcieri blames their union.
“There are money problems all over the world,” Carceiri said. “Everyone knows it but the union. They come in and say, ‘Let’s take off where we were three years ago.’ The world was totally different three years ago. We can’t start there.”
NEARI President Lawrence E. Purtill said the union is “well aware” of the economic times and Tuesday’s election proved “just being nasty doesn’t work.” He said Carcieri should instead focus his energy on resolving the matter rather than making comments.
Jeannette Woolley is NEARI’s representative in the current East Providence talks.
In response to Carcieri’s remarks that the state organization dispatches experienced “hard-ballers,” she said, “That cannot be further from the truth. The NEARI does not dictate the East Providence teachers’ actions, or any teachers for that matter. Mr. Carcieri is way off base.”
WOOLLEY SAID the teachers have tried to help the city with its fiscal troubles. In an offer that was rejected by negotiators late last month, the district would have saved about $1 million in the first year of the contract. It included minimal salary increases, a contribution toward health-care premiums and an end to contract language, which is commonly called “buybacks,” that allowed teachers to be reimbursed when they didn’t take the district’s health insurance.
She and EPEA President Valarie Lawson said those were the areas the committee had concerns with and they addressed them all in the offer.
“The School Committee’s mismanagement of the school system over the past years has, in large part, resulted in the current deficits,” Lawson wrote recently in a news release. “To ask the teachers solely to carry the burden of paying that deficit in the first year of a contract is unfair and unreasonable.”
The district leaders agree there was mismanagement in the past, but they say it is their job to turn the School Department around, starting with a “better” teacher contract.
The city’s educators are the only teachers in Rhode Island who do not pay a percentage of their medical-insurance costs. Health and dental expenses this past year totaled $5.8 million, according to figures from the department.
Having the teachers pay 35 percent of their health costs, as suggested by the School Department negotiators, would save the city a little more than $2 million a year. Making teachers hired after Nov. 1 pay 50 percent of their health insurance is projected to save another $15,902. Getting rid of the buybacks would drop $296,781, they say.
And if teachers agreed to return to their 2006-07 pay scale, Carcieri said the teachers could easily achieve the district’s $3-million demand. (The committee’s first thought was to seek $4.5 million in concessions from the union.)
“They came back and said we hit on everything you asked for, but it was only a little pinch on every one of the [factors],” Carcieri said. “Well, we can’t do it. We must have $3 million and that’s not a bluff. We need that to get over to the other side.”
Both sides are submitting their unresolved contract to arbitration that began yesterday. But, under state teacher bargaining law, the results of arbitration are nonbinding in all financial matters.
Cirillo said being aggressive was the only direction to go, given “how the city has left us.” He was referring to the School Committee’s decision in September to file suit against the City Council under the state’s Caruolo law, asserting that the council didn’t give the department enough money to operate in the last school year.
With 39 years of education experience, Cirillo is the former superintendent in Foster-Glocester where teachers voted no confidence in him because, he says, he took “some hard stances” with the teachers.
While discussing East Providence, he said, “What other approach would you want from a responsible administration?”
Carcieri said “aggressive” shouldn’t be the term to describe the team’s actions. He said the word has a negative connotation and helping the students shouldn’t be attached to such a word.
Yet when asked what adjective he’d use to describe the team’s approach, Carcieri paused briefly and said, “Aggressive.”