NORTH SMITHFIELD — A member of the Town Council says he will be sitting in on the School Committee’s negotiations with its teachers union next year, but the head of the School Committee says that’s an issue that may have to be negotiated itself.

Councilman Paul Zwolenski said the plan is that he will sit in, but not participate, when the School Committee or its negotiating team sits down to come up with a new teacher contract, to replace the one that expires in 2009.

But School Committee Chairman Robert E. Lafleur said while the concept of a council member sitting in on the committee’s negotiating sessions had been discussed in general, he didn’t think the committee had signed off on the specifics.

Lafleur said the committee had not been notified of any plans for Zwolenski to participate and said before that would happen the School Committee would need to understand how it would work. He said the committee hadn’t discussed the matter in detail and he didn’t want to make decisions for the members.

He also said that there will be at least one new member of the School Committee after the fall elections, and the Town Council might have an entirely new membership.

“Maybe in his own mind he is of the opinion that the School Committee was notified,” Lafleur said. But Lafleur said as far as he knew, it was not.

Zwolenski said he was confident the matter had been settled.

“He might have missed one of the meetings,” Zwolenski said.

The idea of a council member sitting in on the talks was kicked around during the Town Council-School Committee meetings on the town budget last spring. Zwolenski said he would not be in the room to participate or make proposals, but to monitor the proceedings and be able to report back to the Town Council, in closed session, on how things were going.

By law, the School Committee is the legal authority for bargaining and agreeing to a teacher contract. That is a problem for the Town Council, which usually gets blamed by taxpayers when it has to set a rate to cover those costs.

Zwolenski said he hoped to bring clarity to the process. One example of that clarity would be in raises, he said. Oftentimes teacher contracts — not just in North Smithfield, but in virtually every district — call for a 3-percent increase, for example. But Zwolenski said that can be misleading because teachers are usually paid in a 10-step system, with pay increasing each year. The 3-percent increase is on each of those step amounts. So a teacher going from one step to another gets the pay increase from going up one step, plus the 3-percent increase. That can create instances where teachers not at the top step can see actual pay jumps much higher than 3 percent, he said.

jhill@projo.com