EAST PROVIDENCE — All were optimistic in the beginning, but contract negotiations between school officials and teachers’ union representatives quickly soured.

The sides couldn’t agree in August on ground rules for bargaining. Mediated sessions in the fall failed to produce a compromise and the schools filed unfair-labor-practices complaints with the state. And just before their differences went to arbitration, new and more aggressive school officials opted to make their contrasting views public. The arbitrator’s decision is expected today, but it is nonbinding on all money matters.

Mike Ryan, a Maine resident and member of the American Arbitration Association, heard testimony throughout November about the city’s growing deficit, pegged at $4.2 million. School officials said the teachers have to help by agreeing to major concessions; the union representatives said the burden shouldn’t lie solely with their members.

The last contract with the East Providence Education Association, which represents the city’s more than 500 teachers, expired on Oct. 31.

Meanwhile, the new leadership of the City Council has linked itself to the School Committee in demanding more concessions from the teachers.

“This council will work with the School Committee in partnership to right its ship,” Mayor Joseph Larisa Jr. said during his inauguration address earlier this month. “Our kids and our taxpayers expect and deserve no less.”

During the arbitration hearings, City Manager Richard Brown testified that the School Committee’s contract proposal — which includes scaling back base salaries to what they were nearly two years ago and making the teachers start paying part of the cost of their health coverage — is “vitally important” to balancing the city’s budget.

“I would describe the fiscal condition of most communities right now as being challenged,” Brown said, according to the Nov. 8 hearing transcripts. “I would describe East Providence as being probably on the verge of bankruptcy.”

Schools Supt. Mario Cirillo, Brown and others supporting the district’s proposal said cutting all discretionary funds — such as for school sports and the senior center — wouldn’t put a dent in the shortfall. They also said School Department janitors, firefighters, the police and others have already made concessions. Lonnie Barham, the district’s human resources director, also said there wasn’t any money to fix the 21 building code violations that the state wanted remedied by Oct. 15.

“What we’re going to suggest or argue to you is that we need to go to the teachers’ contract,” School Department legal counsel Sara A. Rapport told the arbitrator in her opening statement. “And this contract is not impoverished unlike the students in our system or the state of education. What we’re dealing with is a contract that is out of date. It’s a contract that permits people to enjoy the benefits that were comfortable for communities 30 years ago.”

She said if the union doesn’t “step up to the plate” and contribute, teachers will lose jobs and the department will need to be “gutted.”

“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 in her opening statements. She also said the district had opportunities to implement health-care cost sharing before with past contracts but the school board members at the time “dropped the ball.”

In addition, Woolley showed the teachers conceded scheduled raises three years ago when the district needed help, and the committee and school administration didn’t raise the issue of health-care cost sharing then, either.

“So the bottom line from our perspective is that this school district is not in its current condition as a result of what the School Committee likes to term an overly rich contract,” she said. “The facts suggest that the School Committee simply hasn’t taken care of business over the years in this school district.”

Regardless of the blame, Woolley and former union president Roberta Brady said the teachers union made concessions in its proposal that would have saved the district more than $1 million in the first year of the contract. They said what the district wants — $5 million of concessions in each year of the contract — from the teachers is “unreasonable, unsound and unfair.”

apina@projo.com