"I hope that the district and SRC will take up this issue this month," SRC member Johnny Irizarry wrote in an e-mail, adding that he would raise the question for debate this month. The board has a meeting today.
One schools advocate said her group would push the board to simply cut off funding for the BRT workers.
"It's a direct hit against public education," said Helen Gym, a leader of Parents United for Public Education. "It's a test of what type of leadership we're going to have."
In a season of painful choices, what to do about these 78 BRT workers remains a politically prickly question for the SRC.
For decades, the BRT has had a split payroll: Its 120 city workers cannot be involved in politics. But that ban does not apply to the school positions, which are mostly filled with Democratic and Republican Party workers and their relatives.
These workers are not qualified to assess properties. They file paperwork, answer phones, and handle other duties for the assessors.
Donna Aument, Democratic leader of the 33d Ward and a 27-year BRT employee, said the workers have important duties and should not be condemned because they got their jobs through political connections.
"You want to fire me because I don't do my job, I don't have a complaint," she said, "but you want to fire me because I'm a [political] appointment?"
"We do our job. That's the bottom line."
In May, the school board only budgeted enough money to pay the BRT workers until Sept. 30 and said it would prefer that the workers go under the city payroll - a nudge for Mayor Nutter and City Council to act.
But that seems unlikely anytime soon. Even the Council members who are most fed up with the BRT's inaccurate assessments say that patronage isn't the real problem.
"Whether they are committee people or not, I am sensitive to people being unemployed," said Councilman Frank DiCicco, who is pushing for reforms at BRT.
