By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — City officials postponed talks on a possible Caruolo lawsuit from the Woonsocket Education Department for the second time Thursday, saying there are too many fiscal variables in play at the moment to have a meaningful discussion on the topic.

The move came after the House on Thursday, followed by the Senate last night, passed a supplemental state budget that boosts aid to the city by $1.4 million.
As it operates with a projected deficit of $3.2 million, the city Education Department has been threatening to file a Caruolo lawsuit to compel the city to provide additional revenue to wipe out the shortfall. Schools Superintendent Dr. Robert Gerardi said the new state aid might be enough to help the city eliminate “a little” of the deficit, but it’s too soon to take Caruolo talks off the table.
“The key word is a little,” Gerardi said. “It’s not going to solve our problem or even come close. Unfortunately, Caruolo is something we have to keep on the schedule.”
The City Council and the School Committee had initially been slated to hold what was billed as their third and last meeting to address the Caruolo issue on Monday. Anticipating action by the legislature on the state budget, officials rescheduled that session to Thursday. No new meeting has been scheduled.
Mayor Susan D. Menard said that she is reasonably satisfied that the House’s actions mean the city can count on $1.4 million in general revenue sharing in the current year — a figure that is still about $2.2 million less than what was initially promised about a year ago.
But Menard said she does not want officials to delve any further into talks on a Caruolo suit until it’s clear whether the legislature will funnel more federal stimulus money for education to the cities and towns next fiscal year.
“We now know the figures for general revenue sharing — that’s done,” Menard said. “We’ve got to get clarification on education money, and that’s what we’re trying to do right now.”
Likewise, Gerardi said officials in the Education Department were still trying to make sense of the state budget. Gerardi said the state may have some $35 million in economic stimulus money available to divvy up for education, but there are still more questions than answers about the conditions under which the money can be distributed.
Without a significant infusion of revenue from somewhere, it’s an open question how the city – let alone the School Department – will scrape together the funds to make ends meet. Before the House budget was passed, the city was projecting a combined municipal and Education Department deficit exceeding the $8 million mark by July 1 – most of it caused by cuts in state aid two fiscal years in a row.
Under state law, it’s illegal for education departments to operate with a deficit. The law gives them the option of filing a Superior Court action known as a Caruolo suit, forcing their sister municipalities to provide the revenue to wipe out the shortfalls. Menard has been resisting pressure from education officials to issue a supplemental tax bill to raise the necessary funding, however, saying it would not only fall short of solving the problem, but that school officials should do more to gain concessions on wages and benefits from the Woonsocket Teachers Guild.
School Committee Chairman Marc Dubois countered earlier this week that the Education Department has already pared costs close to the bone. Among other things, he said, teachers had agreed to defer pay hikes of 2 percent due this year until 2014. Similar deferrals are also in place for support staffers, and administrators’ salaries have been frozen. Some teaching positions have been eliminated and others consolidated, forcing some teachers to deal with unusually large class sizes.
Dubois said the Education Department was just $90,000 shy of cutting programs to the Basic Education Program required by law - the threshold for filing a Caruolo action. The Education Department could meet the bar merely by eliminating the last handful of extra-curricular activities left in the budget, including spring sports, honor societies, the prom and “a few basic rites of passage for seniors.”
Still, Gerardi says Caruolo would be a last-ditch strategy to eliminate the Education Department’s deficit - and perhaps the least palatable option available because it would also be the most costly. The longer the problem goes unresolved, he said, the more expensive it will be to address in the long run, and Caruolo will only drag the process out and add legal expenses to the financial woes as well.