State Senate expected to vote Tuesday on SRC nominations

Harrisburg will be focused on Gov. Corbett's budget address Tuesday, but the state Senate has set aside time to handle another item of business.

The Republican leadership will ask the Senate to vote to approve the governor's two nominees to the Philadelphia School Reform Commission without public comment.

"As has been the most common practice for SRC nominees in the past, there will not be a public hearing on the nominations," Erik Arneson, spokesman for the Senate Republicans, said in an e-mail Monday. "We expect it to be a single vote, after the governor's budget address."

The law that allowed the state to take over the School District in 2001 and created the SRC requires Senate approval for the governor's nominees but does not require hearings with public comment.

Arneson said last week that Senate Republicans were mulling a request from the advocacy group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools to allow public testimony on Corbett's nomination of City Councilman Bill Green to become chairman of the SRC.

But on a roll-call vote last Tuesday, the Senate's Rules and Executive Nominations Committee unanimously moved both nominations to the full Senate.

In addition to Green, the governor also nominated People's Emergency Center chief Farah Jimenez.

Lisa Haver, a leader with the alliance, said she planned to be in Harrisburg on Tuesday.

She said she would be aboard one of the buses that Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY) has arranged to take parents and advocates to the Capitol to call on the governor to include more funding for public schools in his budget.

The retired teacher said she would watch the Senate vote on the SRC nominations, too. "I'm allowed in the room," Haver said, "but I just can't talk."