East Providence
I just heard on WPRO that the judge won’t decide whether to stop the East Providence School Committee’s unilateral employment change until the 23rd. It looks like union members will start to feel the pinch of not giving concessions. That’s a huge change for the better from an environment in which they expect to get…
Union members and supporters in Rhode Island should contemplate hard where their self-imposed imperatives are placing them in the battle of messages. On their side is a dogged assertion that official processes don’t weaken their hand even during financial emergencies: [Union lawyer John] Leidecker also said state law says districts should adhere to the old…
So states East Providence School Committee Chair Anthony Carcieri in a press release just out (and available in full in the extended entry): “This school system has cut everything to the bone except the teachers’ contract. Everything,” Carcieri said. “They stopped capital improvements years ago. Basic maintenance of the school buildings has all but stopped.…
The rhetorical dance of the East Providence teachers’ union is so flowing, it’s easy to miss the essential argument: “The School Committee’s solution to their self-inflicted fiscal problem is to blame it on the teachers’ contract and to shift the entire burden of paying off that deficit to the teachers,” union representative Jeannette Woolley countered…
