EAST PROVIDENCE — The teachers union, after what it called several days of “simmering” over published comments by local school officials, has sharply rejected their assertions that the teachers are “living large” at taxpayers’ expense, are out of tune with the failing economy and apparently don’t care about the schools’ fiscal woes.

“… How dare anyone say we are not interested in the fiscal health of the city? By the very nature of who we are and what we do, teachers have the greatest vested interest — we are the ones who will still be here in ten or fifteen years, not the elected officials or the superintendent,” Valarie Lawson, president of the 500-member East Providence Education Association, declared in a statement Friday.

She was responding to comments in a Nov. 9 article in The Providence Journal that noted the school board’s hard-line approach to contract negotiations with the teachers in light of a threatened $3-million operating deficit.

School Committee member Anthony A. Carcieri and the rest of the School Department’s negotiating team demonstrated aggressive tactics in their attempts to get contract concessions from the teachers. The team filed two unfair-labor-practices complaints against the East Providence Education Association in September and has consistently demanded that the contract talks be held in public.

The teachers’ contract expired Oct. 31 and the negotiating team and the School Committee rejected the union’s offer that week to concede $1 million in the first year of a new contract. The teachers then unanimously agreed to continue to work under the previous agreement until a new one takes its place. Arbitration began last week and the next session is slated for Nov. 22.

“The million dollars we offered in bargaining is straight from the pockets of our 500 EPEA members,” Lawson said in the Friday statement. “Three years ago we agreed to reopen our contract to give back more than two percent of a bargained raise, amounting to just under another million dollars for the district.”

Lawson was particularly upset by Carcieri’s statements, which she described as “incendiary.” The school board member had harsh words for the local union’s parent, the National Education Association Rhode Island.

Carcieri told the Journal the city’s teachers continue to give excellent care to his special-needs daughter.

But NEARI, he said, uses “experienced hard-ballers who go around from city and town, stepping on the retired librarians and school moms who join the School Committee to help, and have little experience with contract negotiations..

“They’re shaking down municipalities and taking them for more than they are worth,” Carcieri said.

Lawson said Carcieri’s assertion is “off base.” The union does not operate that way, she said.

“I don’t believe the rank-and-file share the same feeling that the union and its officers do,” Carcieri countered. “Discount what I say, let the public be the judge of the teachers union. I’ve heard the public and believe me, they concur with what the East Providence School Committee is doing. This is fiscal responsibility and this is for the children.”

Lawson said she has heard from residents as well and that they can’t understand why the School Committee discussed and executed Supt. Mario Cirillo’s contract in closed session recently if the school board is so adamant that negotiations be held in the open.

Cirillo commented that he is not preventing anyone from discussing his contract and it has been “thoroughly” debated by the board members. He also said that for the last 35 to 40 years, the “secrecy of the collective bargaining agreements [rather than individual contracts] is one element that has placed school systems in jeopardy.”

Said Lawson, “All we ask is that all parties be held to the same standards. We don’t feel an aggressive approach is a productive way to solve this problem.”

apina@projo.com