WESTERLY - After more than three months of formal negotiations, the School Committee plans to vote Monday on a new two-year teachers' contract.

A tentative agreement has been reached between negotiating teams representing the school board and Westerly Teachers' Association (WTA), and now the full board and union membership must each vote to ratify the pacts.

The school board is scheduled to meet at 6:30 p.m. in the Westerly High School media center to discuss and ratify what Chairman James Murano Jr. described as a tentative agreement.

Contract details are expected to be made public that night.

"We plan on going through it item by item in open session," Murano said of the agreement on the table.

It's not known if the roughly 300-member teachers' union has voted to ratify the pact or has scheduled a meeting to do so.

WTA President Donna Allinson and Jerome Egan, an assistant executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island and WTA negotiating team member, did not return calls to comment Thursday.

Westerly teachers have been working without a new contract since the previous three-year pact expired on Aug. 31.

One member of the school board's Contract Negotiations Subcommittee, Louis Sposato, has publicly claimed that the contract is too expensive.

"Westerly cannot afford this contract at this time," he wrote, adding the fault lies with the school board's negotiation team.

Sposato, an independent who is not running for re-election, said the school board and WTA's negotiations teams met Tuesday and approved a tentative two-year agreement that will cost the district more than $156,128 over two years (he did not reveal the exact cost). That meeting, its attendees unknown, was not posted publicly with the Secretary of State's office.

The WTA turned down three earlier offers from the subcommittee - packages that would have cost the district between $112,434 and $156,128 more over two years, he wrote.

Sposato added the contract negates recent district sacrifices including decisions to close Tower Street School, move fifth-grade students to the middle school and lay off 29 teachers in fiscal 2009. And it will mean cutting or scaling back programs, he wrote.

On Thursday, Murano said he was aware of Sposato's letter but wanted to reserve comment until he had a chance to read it in full.

"There are two other members of the School Committee on the negotiations subcommittee and we both supported it," he said of the tentative agreement.

Mary Raftery also represented the School Committee in the negotiations, along with the superintendent, assistant superintendent, director of finance and administration, Schools Solicitor William Nardone and Providence labor attorney Daniel Kinder.

Teams representing the two parties have been holding formal, closed-door negotiations since July 20 and a Department of Labor and Training-appointed mediator has been participating in the talks since August. At a standstill, the parties had been scheduled Wednesday to enter interest arbitration, where a panel of three arbitrators would hear each side's proposal and determine what to put in the contract.

Monetary decisions, however, are not binding.

While contract details have not been made public, the pact was expected to address a recent directive by the state education commissioner calling for school districts to eliminate seniority-based assignments. Westerly teacher assignments have largely been based on seniority.

And while the school board entered negotiations saying this fiscal year's $49.37-million school budget does not include money for teacher pay raises, Sposato's letter indicates the new contract does include new salary and benefit costs.

The board headed into negotiations calling for teachers to pay more toward their health and dental coverage, support a restructured health insurance plan and agree to a new teacher evaluation system.

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