By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — The preliminary maneuvering in the School Committee's $3.7 million Caruolo lawsuit against the city is starting to look like a high-stakes game of legal chess.

In a countermove to similar actions taken by the city, the School Committee has voted to hire Providence lawyer Stephen M. Robinson as co-counsel in the case. School Committee Chairman Marc Dubois said Robinson would back up the board's regular counsel, Richard Ackerman, during a trial-like hearing that is slated to begin in Superior Court on Monday.
The effort to up-armor its legal arsenal comes after Judge Daniel A. Procaccini postponed the hearing to give the city time to retain West Warwick lawyer Tim Williamson. Another Superior Court judge recently threw out a Caruolo lawsuit which had been brought against the town of West Warwick, where Williamson not only serves as town solicitor, but as a state representative in the General Assembly.
“The last thing we want to do is spend more money, but we certainly want to get a fair shake in this trial,” said School Committee Chairman Marc Dubois.
The School Committee voted 3-0 to hire Robinson at a cost of $150 to $200 per hour during a hastily-called emergency session late Friday. In addition to Dubois, only committee members Linda Majewski and Anita McGuire-Forcier were in attendance for the closed-door session, held in private under an exception to the  the state Open Meetings Act covering pending litigation.
But Dubois said committeewomen Michelle Williams and Eleanor Nadeau also phoned in their support for hiring Robinson, the same lawyer who is to represent the School Committee in a so-called “fair funding” lawsuit against the General Assembly.
Dubois said it was actually Procaccini who first suggested that school officials seek out Robinson's services for additional help in Caruolo - if Williamson were unavailable. The chairman said Ackerman, its regular counsel of long standing, “feels it is in our best interest to bring someone on board who has experience in these cases.”
At issue is a $3.7 million shortfall in the School Committee's $62.9 million budget for the fiscal year that ended on June 30. Filing suit under the increasingly controversial Caruolo Act, the School Committee has petitioned the Superior Court to compel the city to provide the School Department with the revenue to eliminate the deficit, perhaps by issuing a supplemental tax bill. The City Council already rejected a $1.37 per thousand supplemental bill to address the shortfall earlier this year in a failed effort to short-circuit the lawsuit, which some members argued would only be more costly in the long run.
The irony of the latest courtroom matchup is that it pits Robinson against a member of the General Assembly, which Robinson openly blames for causing such shortfalls by embracing an institutionalized - and illegal - form of financial discrimination against poor urban school districts in the distribution of state aid. The Woonsocket School Committee, along with its counterparts in Pawtucket and Providence, have already agreed to hire Robinson to represent them as co-plaintiffs in a fair funding lawsuit in which the members of the General Assembly would be named as defendants.
Although no papers have been filed in the case yet, the suit is aimed at forcing the General Assembly to adopt a balanced formula for distributing school aid to cities and towns based on objective criteria, such as the size of the tax base, median income and student population. Robinson and other advocates of reform say Rhode Island is the only state in the nation that does not have such a formula in effect – a violation of constitutional guarantees to every child's right to equal educational opportunities.
In a telephone interview Monday, Robinson said he feels uniquely positioned to help the School Committee because the Caruolo and fair funding lawsuits “are joined at the hip.”
“I honestly think there's a real connection here,” says Robinson. “I find it a little amusing the city is bringing in a top legislative leader when the real problem isn't the city's or the school committee's, it's the state's failure to fund education properly.”
The School Committee has agreed to pay Robinson between $150 and $200 an hour for his services on Caruolo, while the city is expected to be on the hook for at least as much to pay Williamson. Dubois says it would be purely speculative at this point to say how long it will be before the dispute is resolved, though Procaccini has made it clear he believes it should be put to rest before students return to classes at the beginning of September.
A full-blown hearing in Caruolo was originally set to begin on July 20, but Procaccini reluctantly agreed to a postponement to allow the city more time for Williamson to enter an appearance.
Williamson has served as West Warwick's assistant or lead solicitor for nearly 17 years and he has been a state lawmaker for just as long, currently holding the position of vice chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary, among others.