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Hello again PaulHuff:

Glad to provide the information. It's very instructive to go back and read what the school committee was putting on the table, and how some fairly simple information has been clouded by all the heated rhetoric.

You bring up a perfect example with the weighting of special ed students. As the link explains, the school committee wanted to bring Warwick into line with the rest of the districts in Rhode Island and not weight students, and the union resisted that move.

What eventually happened was, the district realigned classrooms that led to an overload of special ed students in some classrooms, with some that having a regular ed teacher alone with 25+ students including several with IEPs. This is objective fact, it's not union spin.

Arguably, the school department could not have taken these steps if the union had agreed to a contract that eliminated weighting and ensured appropriate staffing levels. Because when they talk about "serving the kids," it's having enough skilled teachers in the classroom that ultimately determines how well they're educated, not some cold calculation about how many kids a special ed student represents. That's what weighting is, after all: It's a way to say, "This student has an IEP so he counts for two kids."

Here was a perfect chance for the WTU to capitalize on something that most reasonable people would agree about: Kids deserve the right number of teachers for their needs to help them succeed.

But no, instead we get pickets at City Hall, PR stunts like the no-confidence vote and sick-outs-that-aren't-really-sick-outs, and sweeping statements instead of critical details.

Opportunity wasted.

Take a look at this, as another example. It's the WTU newsletter from April, 2017: http://warwickteachersunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/04-2017-NEWSLETTER.pdf

That's the most recent version available at the WTU website. Read specifically the note under "Interest Arbitration," where WTU president Netcoh writes: "After the school committee and superintendent have wasted over a year’s worth of time and an exorbitant amount of taxpayers’ money, the question that one must ask is, “Are they going to be willing to accept the arbitrator’s ruling?” If not, the question becomes, “Why?”

I'm sure you'll agree that's a stridently political statement, one that's become a favorite talking point of Mrs. Netcoh in the last few months. More to the point, it's a statement that does nothing to resolve any issue that the WTU claims it wants to fix.

The quote above is another example of the WTU trying to misdirect people: The union is spending taxpayer funded union dues to initiate NLRB and court cases, but they conveniently don't mention that, so it's disingenuous to make an issue of the taxpayer funded school committee spending money to defend them.

Again, most reasonable people can agree that "wasting" tax money is bad, and the WTU could have used that as a basis for actual agreement. But, again, no, instead they keep spending money in ultimately futile attempts to fight the last contract instead of signing a new one.