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That's me in the bottom left hand of the above picture. I was there. I saw the genuine pain on the faces of each School Committee member and I sincerely appreciated what they were agonizing over during the meeting Tuesday night. I didn't hear then, any mention of cuts to the administrations income though. Today I am reading that they would consider a 1% salary cut ONLY IF THE TEACHERS DID THE SAME. That would be an equal way to "share the expense" IF BOTH SIDES HAD EQUAL PAY INCREASES AND EQUAL NEW HIRES OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS! BUT THEY HAVEN'T!. Not even close. After two years of stone-walled negotiations when the Warwick Teachers Union (WTU) was willing to sit and negotiate but then-Mayor Avedisian and the School Committee (SC) were NOT, it seems to me that the only equal way to distribute this short-fall today would be as a percentage of total salary-increases-and-new-hires over the last two years. That way, the administration would be giving back the same percentage of money they spent on salary increases AND NEW HIRES over the last two years, as they were asking the teachers to give. This is the ONLY math that is honestly an "equal treatment". If the SC had given themselves the same nominal raises that the teachers received, AND took the same layoffs, they would have "equal treatment" with the teachers. But they didn't. They gave themselves excessive raises and added new hires to the administration like an "Asst. Principal of Climate and Culture" and an "Asst. Principal of Teaching and Learning", while at the same time they were laying off teachers by the hundred. You can't ignore that inequity. You just can't. It's not fair to the teachers, the students, the parents and the 80,000 taxpayers that are paying the tab.

Happy Summer everyone.

Rick Corrente

The Taxpayers Mayor