School officials pleased with new contract

WOONSOCKET – The Woonsocket Education Department will quickly dip into reserves for roughly $1 million to pay the first installment of its new three-year pact with the Woonsocket Teachers Guild – retroactive to July 1, 2018 – before the end of the fiscal year, officials say.

“There’s a big push on right now to get everyone caught up,” said the WED’s Finance Director Brad Peryea, “We’re going to backfill it now. We’re not going to wait.”

The city’s long-stalled talks with the WTG ended with a sigh of relief from just about everyone involved Wednesday as some 680 teachers and classroom aides voted overwhelmingly in

favor of a successor to their last pact, which expired on June 30, 2018. The contract was later approved by the School Committee, paving the way Thursday for teachers to resume extracurricular volunteer work they’d withheld since September, when they voted to “work to rule.”

“It’s a relief and we’re glad we’re done,” said School Committee Chairman Paul Bourget. “Work to rule was horrible. That has hurt our parents, our kids and our teachers.

“I’m glad the process is done and we can all get back

to work.”

The new contract gives teachers a raise of 1.5 percent during the current fiscal year. The following year, beginning July 1, teachers would get a phased-in series of raises roughly equal to a net 2 percent. And for the year beginning July 1, 2020, teachers at the top three steps of the contract only – steps 8-10 – would receive an additional 2 percent.

The contract also includes a reopener for a possible hike in state aid. The WTG would be entitled to claim up to 20 percent of the increase to distribute however members see fit, as long as it’s for salaries at one or more steps of the contract.

Many variables are at play

that affect teachers’ salaries, including longevity and the level of education individual employees have completed. However, under the new pact, a teacher at the top step of the pay schedule who holds a bachelor’s degree would earn $77,720 a year by the time the contract expires – an increase of $4,847, according to documents supplied by the WED. A teacher at the top step with a master’s degree would earn $81,412, an increase of $5,077.

Paraprofessionals, who were among the lowest paid of their kin in the state, received raises of 3, 4 and 3 percent, respectively, in each of the three fiscal years the pact covers.

In order to pay for the salary hikes, the city will have to allocate a total of roughly $7.1 million in new labor costs for the life of the pact – about $6.8 million of it for teachers, according to school officials.

That includes about $968,000 during the current fiscal year.

“We are tapping our reserves,” said Bourget. “We’ve enjoyed surpluses over the last three, four or five years. We didn’t spend them because we knew knew we had a contract coming. We knew that was for a rainy day. We are using our reserves – but not all of them, we hope.”

Reacting to the resolution, Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt urged the School Committee to look for ways of find

ing economies in its budget as the costs of the new pact chip away at the WED’s reserves, which currently stand at about $5 million. She said it may be difficult, but cuts in programs or positions outmoded by new technology might be inevitable.

“Now it’s time to start to look internally to see if they can capture savings,” the mayor said. “Although we are in a better position than we were five years ago, we are still fragile.”

Baldelli-Hunt’s proposed $145 million budget, up for a public hearing on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Harris Hall, calls for no increase in residential property taxes – and makes no provision for covering any portion of the WTG’s now-approved wage hike. The School Committee has asked for a modest increase in the city’s locally-generated contribution of $16.1 million for schools – the allotment has been flat for several years – but it’s unclear whether the City Council will consider adjusting the mayor’s spending plan to do so.

Announced by WTG President Jeffrey Partington at Wednesday’s School Committee meeting, the resolution of the contract comes after talks sputtered on in fits and starts for about 14 months, though some factors were outside the control of negotiators.

“We will be lifting our work to rule,” Partington said in making the announcement.

“We can finally get back to the business of educating the best students in Rhode Island.”

Partington said he was “thankful and honored” to have worked with a collective bargaining group on the other side of the table that was “thrown into a situation that was probably difficult for them.”

The talks stretch back to February 2018 and started out with a negotiating team chosen by Baldelli-Hunt because, at that time, the School Committee was composed of members who were mayoral appointees. The seating of the negotiating team seemed to take some members of the appointive committee by surprise, by the city’s Law Department later issued an advisory opinion clarifying the mayor’s statutory authority to seat the panel under state law.

The WTG declared an impasse in the talks in August 2018, after 16 sessions with the mayor’s negotiating team. The talks continued briefly under the supervision of a state-appointed mediator.

Last summer, however, voters went to the polls to change the way members of the School Committee are seated, abolishing the appointive system in place since 2013 and reverting back to an elective panel. The negotiating committee was disbanded.

The newly elective School Committee seated a new negotiating team, but there was still some lag time before talks resumed in earnest because members needed time to get up to speed, according to Bourget.

“During the last four months, we really started digging into it,” he said.

As talks continued, members of the WTG resorted to informational picketing to make the case to the public that they deserved a pay hike. The city concluded collective bargaining talks with the International Brotherhood of Police Local 404 and other city workers while the talks with teachers dragged on, leaving WTG members and paraprofessionals earning less than many of their peers in other communities.

The WTG argued that their salaries of its members had been virtually frozen since providing the cost-cutting Budget Commission with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of givebacks in 2012. Teachers last received a pay hike of 2 percent during the final year of their existing pact, but before that members hadn’t had a raise since 2009, the union said.

“The teachers and paraprofessionals have sacrificed a lot for this city in the past,” Partington said. “While the contract does not compensate for all of those losses, we believe it gets our teachers and paraprofessionals closer to fair compensation and is what was available given the amount of money the school committee had to spend.”

Bourget called the contract “both fair to the teachers and paraprofessionals and “fiscally responsible for the school department and the city.”

“I think we did very well,” he said. “Both sides were looking for the same thing. The teachers needed to get an increase. They’d gotten few raises in recent years and they were way behind the rest of the teachers in the state. They knew we wanted to give them a raise and that we wanted to give them as much as we could afford.”