Attorney warns South Kingstown School Committee: Rhode Island's 'evergreen' law limits leverage in three upcoming contract talks

A labor attorney hired by the South Kingstown School Committee told members at their summer workshop, held Tuesday, that a 2019 change to Rhode Island law leaves the district with little power to force cost-saving changes on its unions once contracts expire — a legal reality the committee will confront as it heads into negotiations covering its teachers, its custodial and maintenance staff, and its paraprofessionals.

The attorney, introduced by the superintendent as an experienced Rhode Island labor negotiator, walked the committee through the state's "evergreen" statute, which he compared to a tree that never loses its leaves. Under the law, when a public-sector contract expires without a new agreement, all of its terms — wages, health insurance, staffing language — remain in force indefinitely. Unlike a private employer, the school district cannot declare an impasse and unilaterally impose changes such as a cheaper health plan. "The employer is essentially locked into those existing expired contracts' terms," he said, adding that legal challenges from other Rhode Island municipalities have so far failed to overturn the law.

According to the South Kingstown School Committee's published meeting recording, the attorney used the district's own numbers to frame the stakes. He cited enrollment figures showing a decline from roughly 3,300 students to a current figure that committee members themselves gave inconsistently, somewhere between about 2,210 and 2,465. Over roughly the same period, he said, the school department's budget rose from $61,391,825 to a current $66,839,725. Fixed costs such as heating and cleaning buildings do not shrink with enrollment, he said, and employee benefit costs only climb.

Officials in the room put a number on that pressure: total benefit costs, including health care and retirement, run about $13 million for a workforce of roughly 400 employees. Healthcare costs alone rose 12.06% this past year, a figure the attorney said was worse than average but not unusual for small Rhode Island districts, some of which he said have absorbed 20% increases.

The attorney also pointed to recent wage settlements — 2% in 2024, 2% in 2025, and 2.5% in 2026 — as low compared with what he is seeing elsewhere in the state this year, where contracts are landing closer to 3% to 3.5%, with some reaching 4%. That gap, he said, matters because unions research comparable districts through data maintained by the state's insurance trust, and will use it to argue the school committee's wage offers or benefit-change requests are out of step with the market.

Because the district cannot force changes, the attorney said, its only real tool is persuasion: identifying specific, costed-out proposals — not a wish list — and explaining to union negotiators why a request is reasonable, supported by comparisons to other communities. He singled out the teachers' 82-page contract as an example of how deeply negotiated procedures, including multi-step processes for altering health insurance, make unilateral change impractical even in theory.

A committee member, describing an earlier teaching career elsewhere in Rhode Island, recounted a district that let a contract lapse and then imposed pay cuts of roughly 5% to 8.5% depending on educators' degrees, an episode the attorney said helped drive unions to push the evergreen law through the General Assembly. Committee members and administrators agreed the law leaves little room to simply declare costs unaffordable; instead, several said, the district must build trust with union leadership and make its financial case repeatedly over time.

According to the recording, the teachers' contract has expired, with a June 30, 2026 date cited during the discussion, and the district also faces separate negotiations this cycle with its custodial and maintenance union and its paraprofessionals' union. The committee did not set specific bargaining dates during the workshop. Residents can review the full discussion, along with related budget planning also raised at the meeting, through the South Kingstown School Committee's published meeting recording.