It’s hard to find any good detail on what’s going on there, so some of this is conjecture and reading between the lines. This was a problem I always had in representing the employer; you simply could not communicate with reporters and get the employer’s side of the story out. I even went so far as to call in the AP and local reporters and give them a Labor Relations 101 briefing whenever we were in bargaining. Unfortunately, most reporters, like most teachers, were mediocre students who went to mediocre schools, did mediocre, work, and got mediocre grades. Consequently, they write stories that are mediocre – at best.

Teachers have two primary bodies of rights; teacher tenure laws and teacher bargaining laws. Either one would impose a hefty burden on an employer but both pose an almost insurmountable burden on an employer trying to actually control a workforce. It looks as if the Superintendent has chosen not to renew the contracts of the current teaching staff. This would be an action you would take under a teacher tenure law, most of which provide for indiviidual contracts of employment. Generally, such individual contracts are subject to non-renewal for lack of work or funds, in which case the teacher is laid off, not dismissed. Other than lack of work or funds, non-renewal must be for cause. Cause may be defined in state or local law or in a union contract – or in all three. Consequently, an action to dismiss a teacher may be contested through a collectively bargained grievance procedure to arbitration and may be contested de novo in state courts or an arbitrator’s decision may be reviewed by state courts, usually with little or no deference on the state law claims.

The other side of this is the collective bargaining rights of the teachers. I’m too lazy to look for the whole RI law or any labor board decisions, but I found some excerpts and it looks pretty similar to other state bargaining laws from the sixties and seventies. Any change in the employees’ wages, hours, or terms and conditions of employees must be bargained and either an agreement reached or a valid state of impasse established. This is the case even if the agreement has expired. The defense against an impasse declaration is to charge that the employer did not bargain in good faith, which charge is adjudicated as an unfair labor practice complaint by a labor board, probably a state board in RI. RI is a Blue state, so that board is likely to be very union friendly, so the employer would need to be willing to go to the SC. Of course, the union will get a TRO while the appeals are going on and play for time to buy a new school board, new labor board, or even a new governor and legislature while the case is pending. Welcome to my world!

and hooked up with the Gregoire Administration. During Knowles, D – Alaska, we promoted all sorts of people with no qualifications into high level HR/LR jobs. Some of them saw the handwriting on the wall in the last year or so of Knowles, others we had to use more “direct” means after Murkowski took office. Anyway, they’re down there making Gregoire’s union friends happy.