EAST PROVIDENCE — Saying it had to halt a financial “death spiral,” the School Committee notified teachers yesterday that they will have to pay some of their health insurance costs for the first time and that their salaries will be reduced.

Those changes and others will be implemented Monday — when students return from holiday break — without the approval of the East Providence Education Association, which represents the city’s more than 500 teachers.

“It’s our assumption that we will be in court Monday,” union representative Jeannette Woolley said last night. A meeting with the members this weekend is unlikely since union leaders were not notified until late yesterday afternoon. Woolley said she had not heard of such measures ever taken in Rhode Island and that she and others are in “shock.”

The committee’s unilateral actions are the most recent of several aggressive steps taken by new school officials who are quickly becoming the toughest bargaining team any teachers union in Rhode Island has ever faced. The bold moves first surfaced when the district realized it had a growing $4.2-million deficit and contract negotiations with the East Providence Education Association broke down early.

Talks began over the summer, but the two sides couldn’t even agree on ground rules for the meetings. Mediated sessions failed in the fall and the contract between the city and teachers expired on Halloween. An arbitrator heard proposals from each side in November and the decision, released just before Christmas, met in the middle of their drastically different offers.

But the arbitrator’s recommendations were nonbinding on all financial matters. The teachers union agreed Monday to abide by the arbitration, and the committee unanimously rejected it Tuesday night, leading to another impasse.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” School Committee Chairman Anthony A. Carcieri said in a statement yesterday. “On October 31, we had $4.5 million in bills we couldn’t pay. It’s only gotten worse since then. If we don’t stop the blood loss now, we’ll owe $9 million next October, and the schools will simply stop functioning. This is a death spiral. We’ve got to stop it.”

The School Committee called its next step “unilateral implementation,” where the district is essentially run like a business and the employees must choose to “stay and live with” the bosses’ decisions, Carcieri said in late October.

“This crew in East Providence makes the management in the auto business look like geniuses,” union lawyer John Leidecker said. “It was their own negligence and malfeasance that caused the [city’s fiscal woes]. But it’s the employees who suffer.”

Leidecker also said state law says districts should adhere to the old contract until a new one is executed, and there aren’t exceptions for a fiscal crisis. In addition, he said the committee members’ decisions yesterday “further indicates their disdain for the process,” particularly the arbitration process, which produced a “fair settlement.”

While the arbitrator suggested no salary increase this year, for example, the committee will scale back the teachers’ base salaries nearly 5 percent to their levels more than two years ago. The cut in salaries will reduce that expense from $33.2 million to $31.7 million, starting Monday.

Longevity and advanced-degree bonuses have also been reduced. The teachers will also begin paying 20 percent toward health-insurance premiums. They don’t pay anything now. And the controversial buyback clause that used to give teachers up to $5,100 for not taking the city’s health insurance has been eliminated completely.

Carcieri said the changes would have saved the district $3 million this year if they had been implemented at the start of the city’s fiscal year, which was Nov. 1. Because two months have lapsed, the savings will be less than $3 million and that’s “still not enough,” Carcieri said last night.

In the district’s news release, the committee emphasized it has been taking steps to cut costs in multiple areas and those affecting the teachers are just the latest. Bus aides were eliminated in November and having a private contractor take over transportation saved the district $549,000 a year. Custodians made a group of contract concessions last year, and they were the first in the department to contribute to their health insurance.

The committee also filed a lawsuit in September under the state’s Caruolo law, asserting that the City Council didn’t give the department enough money to operate in the past school year. It is unknown if a second suit will be filed for this year’s allotment.

“This school system has cut everything to the bone except the teachers’ contract,” Carcieri said, noting that capital improvements and basic maintenance to school buildings ceased long ago.

“We’ve been ordered to replace about 70 doors for safety reasons, and there’s no money to pay for it,” Carcieri said. “We have no extras in our educational program. We’ve had expert after expert look at this. There is no place left to cut except our biggest account — teachers’ pay. I hope they’ll understand that this is nothing we want to do. We have no choice.”

Mayor Joseph Larisa said: “East Providence is flat broke. The big labor contract that finally expired was as outrageous as it is unaffordable. Now that the damage has been done, the options left are a crazy 15 to 20 percent property-tax increase against our hard-hit taxpayers, bankruptcy or finally setting reasonable and fair compensation for all school employees. There is no fourth option.

“Today’s action is a step toward fiscal sanity.”

apina@projo.com