Mount Pleasant High School

The Providence City Council gave preliminary approval last night to the city budget for the new fiscal year that started July 1. The Projo’s Phil Marcelo has a thorough overview of the budget, including a big hike in the car tax that’s going to affect a lot of drivers.

Mayor Taveras released a statement after the council vote that included this line: “We also owe great thanks to the members of Local 1033, firefighters, police, city employees, residents and taxpayers who all share deeply in the sacrifice needed to save our city.”

Missing from that roll call are Providence’s teachers – the last big group of city workers who haven’t reached a deal on concessions with the administration.

On first glance, that looks like a bad sign. But looks can be deceiving.

Taveras spokeswoman Melissa Withers declined to comment on the substance of negotiations between the teachers union and the mayor’s office except to describe them as “ongoing.” However, she confirmed that the budget passed by the council includes all the savings expected from an agreement with the teachers.

It’s unlikely the councilmen would have passed the budget if they weren’t confident there will be a deal, and Withers did not sound particularly worried. So an announcement could be coming before long.

(photo: Providence Public Schools)

Taveras speaks at City Hall in March

The Taveras administration says negotiations with the Providence Teachers Union have not broken down despite the organization’s decision to call an afternoon press conference blasting the city.

“Negotiations with the teachers union are ongoing,” mayoral spokesman David Ortiz said in an email. “With the new fiscal year quickly approaching, there is definitely a sense of urgency to conclude the process as soon as possible.”

Ortiz’s message arrived just 20 minutes after the teachers union issued a media advisory accusing the administration of turning down more than $16 million in concessions; wrongfully terminating 125 teachers; and telling 97 teachers the school department had not found a position for them next year.

Mayor Angel Taveras’ director of communications, Melissa Withers, declined to address the union’s accusations directly, citing the administration’s policy of not negotiating through the media. She also said the 97 teachers will be able to apply for 90 other open teaching positions in the city for this fall.

“I doubt very seriously that that’s the end of the negotiations,” Withers said of the union’s press conference. “I think they’ve been pretty vocal all along.”

The teachers union is the only one of the city’s four major employee groups that hasn’t concluded its concession negotiations with the Taveras administration. Local 1033 and the firefighters agreed to cutbacks, while 78 police officers are now being laid off after their union couldn’t reach a deal.

But were the teachers fired? Laid off? Dismissed? Terminated? Given pink slips?

For many average workers, that probably sounds like a distinction without a difference – if you lost your job, you’d use any of those terms to describe your misfortune.

But in the world of public education, each of those words has a specific definition that can mean the difference between a job and an unemployment check for a teacher. That’s why educators begged the school committee to issue layoff notices rather than dismissal notices, to no avail, as my colleague Alex DiPrato reported last night.

Here’s a little guide to help you understand the different terms and what they mean, based on interviews with state, city and union officials.

Termination notices: This is what the teachers received in Providence. The Taveras administration says it will give the city “maximum flexibility” in deciding which teachers to rehire – and how much money it needs to budget for their compensation – once its financial situation is sorted out. The teacher’s union says it’s wrong for the city to terminate them en masse without an individual cause case-by-case.

Dismissal notices: A synonym for termination notices.

Firings: Another synonym for termination notices.

Layoff notices: This is what the teacher’s union wanted teachers to get in Providence. Unlike a terminated teacher, a laid-off teacher has a variety of rights to stay in the system as, say, a substitute and possibly get rehired down the road. The Taveras administration says it issued terminations rather than layoffs “out of an abundance of caution” because those provisions could wind up costing more money.

Pink slips: A synonym for layoff notices.

It’s also slightly misleading to say all the teachers have been fired, as opposed to the admittedly more technical have been given termination notices. Those notices do not take effect until June 24, the last day of school, and the city has until then to rescind as many of them as it wants.

“The vast majority of teachers will have their terminations rescinded, and if it were not for the March 1 deadline we would not have sent out notices to all teachers,” Taveras spokeswoman Melissa Withers told me. She emphasized that most teachers will have the same jobs next year as they do today.

Another question we’ve received here is whether teachers will be ineligible for unemployment benefits because they got termination notices rather than layoff notices. That is not true.

Speaking generally, the R.I. Department of Labor and Training tells me teachers would still be able to collect unemployment so long as their employer – in this case, the city – does not dispute their claim that they weren’t at fault for losing their jobs, though the distinction could delay their benefits by up to 3 weeks.

Withers told me the city will not attempt to block teachers from receiving unemployment benefits. “Teachers will not be penalized for the fact that our fiscal situation is so dire,” she said.

As Withers noted, it’s also important to understand why all this is happening now, four months before the end of the school year – teachers have to be told if their jobs are in jeopardy by March 1. Rhode Island state law says in part (emphasis mine):

Whenever a tenured teacher in continuous service is to be dismissed, the notice of the dismissal shall be given to the teacher, in writing, on or before March 1st of the school year immediately preceding the school year in which the dismissal is to become effective.

Lastly, all this takes place against the backdrop of looming negotiations: the Providence Teachers Union’s current contract with the city expires June 30.

Update: Another way to think about it is that a teacher who gets laid off is still part of the school district even after the school year ends, while ties are completely severed with a teacher who gets terminated.

A termination notice “is final,” whereas a layoff notice means a teacher is “suspended and put on a recall list,” Dave Abbott, deputy commissioner and general counsel at the R.I. Department of Education, told me.

That is, a terminated teacher would have to be rehired to get his or her job back, while a laid-off teacher has the possibility of getting recalled.

Abbott used this example: if a high-school chemistry teacher is laid off in the summer, and then a high-school chemistry job opens in the fall, that teacher has a right to take that job. “If [the school department has] a chemistry teacher on that recall list, they can’t go out and hire another chemistry teacher,” he said – they have to hire the most senior one on the recall list.

But if that same high-school chem teacher was terminated – that is, fired, as in Providence – he isn’t on any list, and he has no right to the job that opened up; he would have to apply for it just like anybody else.