Here that bell ringing? That’s the sound of classes starting in Buffalo Public Schools—and the start of round two in the ongoing media war between Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James Williams and Buffalo Teachers Federation President Phil Rumore.

Last fall and spring the two traded jabs in the papers, on the radio and on television, while contract negotiations—complicated by the wage freeze for all public employees mandated by the city’s control board—stalled over a number of Williams’ cost-cutting proposals, most notably a switch from multiple healthcare carriers to a single-carrier plan.

Williams repeatedly characterizes Rumore as a dinosaur who does teachers and students a disservice by blocking reform. Rumore responds by characterizing Williams as a bull in a china shop, who refuses to reach out to district employees and make them partners in realizing his vision for a modernized, consolidated, high-achieving school system.

When Williams took up his post in July 2005, he brought with him a reputation as a fierce and often antagonistic contract negotiator and a proponent of charter schools. His rough treatment of the teachers’ union in Dayton, Ohio, where he served as superintendent from 1991 to 1999, led to a 16-day strike in 1993. He was eventually dismissed from that position in the wake of a budgeting disaster, in which the district’s projected deficit of $200,000 turned out to exceed $10 million. He also brought a reputation for finding innovative revenue streams for public schools and the tenacious pursuit of improved test scores. He is at the helm of Buffalo’s state-funded, $1 billion schools reconstruction program, which he views as a rare opportunity for a complete overhaul of Buffalo Public Schools, which is among the lowest-ranked in the state for academic performance.

Rumore has stayed on as BTF’s president for 25 years, in large part because he relentlessly—some would say obstinately—protects his teachers’ pay and benefits, which remain generous in comparison to both state and national averages for public schools. (The average pay of a Buffalo public school teacher is about $54,000, almost $10,000 higher than the national average and about $2,000 higher than the New York State average.) He says teachers—and the city’s unionized workers generally—have a bad rap, that they work hard, receive fair pay and have routinely made concessions to help the city and the school district keep afloat.

Rumore’s BTF and the rest of the city’s unions commenced a series of protests last week, picketing the Allentown home of the control board’s executive director, Dorothy Johnson, and demanding that the control board lift the wage freeze that has been in place for the past two years. Rumore says the unions will picket again on Thursday—control board members Bob Wilmers and Brian Lipke are high on the list of targets—and will do so again and again, until they’ve made their point: The control board, they say, is overstepping its mandate, victimizing workers while it coddles big business and enforcing an illegal wage freeze.

Williams, meanwhile, is touting the success of his new summer school program to argue for the addition of 20 days to the school year—without specifying where the money will come from to fund the extension or whether any of that money would wind up in the pockets of teachers. Rumore says that student achievement would be better served by hiring more teachers and therefore reducing class sizes.

In other words, the public relations battle is joined once again. They are near perfect adversaries, an unstoppable object and an immoveable force; which is which depends largely on where one’s sympathies lie. Artvoice spoke to both—separately, of course; even contract negotiations are taking place through a mediator at this point—and asked each to reflect on the past year and the year to come.