TOM WARD - Our wizards 'suspend the rules' to keep work behind the curtain

As the General Assembly meets this week, thousands of Rhode Islanders will be watching the bill (H 5142) that would allow teachers' unions the right to request binding arbitration after not having success with a local school committee.

Last week's House Labor Committee meeting, chaired by North Providence's Rep. Arthur J. Corvese, gave opponents like me reason to be more hopeful after hours of hearings. Corvese's committee took no action last week, and many believe the bill is dead for now. That noted, this is Halloween week, and there's no better place for a bill to rise from the dead than in our General Assembly.

Tuesday, the Providence Journal reported that "the floor calendars have not yet been posted, but whatever is ultimately posted Monday will change substantially before the end of the week.

Reported Steve Peoples: "Assembly leaders have 'suspended the rules,' which normally require 48-hour notice of all committee and floor action. That means committee hearings can be held with a few minutes notice... just as has happened in the final days of recent Assembly sessions."

Now let's think about this. Generally, the House rules mandate that the public gets to inspect bills for a few days in advance of debate. The rules get tossed aside in the heated final days of the session. Let's just call it what it really is - legalized bad government by folks who don't want the public to know what they are up to.

So here comes a two-day session, with three months warning and two months vacation starting Friday, and it's an "emergency," where rules are suspended and our legislators get to keep the public in the dark on what they will debate?

The Journal reported Tuesday that NEA executive director Robert A. Walsh said he was "concerned, but not panicked" that the binding arbitration bill wasn't posted on any agendas.

"You never know what's going to come up at the very last minute," he said.

Walsh is right. You never know. But you should know, and there is absolutely no reason for a lack of transparency in a two-day session in October. But by and large, because we're a pretty good-sized bunch of politician-worshipping sycophants who keep re-electing the whole lot, they never get embarrassed by their actions.

* Education Commissioner Deborah Gist is my new hero. She has ordered superintendents to stop using teacher seniority as the primary basis for hiring for open positions. She claims it is in conflict with the state's new Basic Education Plan that mandates the hiring of only the most highly effective staff.

As most readers know, hiring teachers by seniority allows, for instance, the layoff of a young, less senior English teacher and his or her replacement in the classroom by a more senior history teacher who might be certified in English, but has no passion for the subject. Combine hiring by seniority with outsized pensions unavailable in any other job and you may fill your schools with teachers going through the motions in the last decade of their careers.

Seniority is just one part of the toxic stew that leads us to low test scores and kids who don't value the only education - the only chance - they will ever get.

Gist's decision will set up one hell of a fight with the unions, but if you had to decide which side was in it "for the kids," which would you choose, management or labor?

* The list of names is long for those politicians who spoke out to make sure Nathan Hannon could collect his state unemployment check. Hannon, a Cumberland resident with life partner state Administrative Magistrate R. David Cruise, cheated the state by not showing up for his education coordinator work for R.I. Resource Recovery, reported the Sunday Journal. The sidebar to Sunday's front page story, "Hornet's Nest," was even more damning, detailing the numerous times Hannon told his bosses he was heading out to teach a class on recycling, then never showing up for the job, and handing in and collecting on mileage reports for trips he never took.

Senate Majority Leader Dan Connors; Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed's chief of staff, Tom Coderre; Gov. Carcieri's director of administration, Gary Sasse; and Carcieri chief of staff (and now judge) Brian Stern, were all apparently part of the effort to get Hannon his unemployment pay after he was fired for cause.

Hannon's relationships with friends in high places make it clear that in Rhode Island, it is indeed "who you know" that enriches you - and impoverishes your neighbors - on the sweat of real workers. The rest of us are all suckers.

Hannon deserves nothing. Shame on anyone who picked up a phone to help him.

- Ward is publisher of

The Valley Breeze newspapers