The Minneapolis public schools are considering pulling out of a 20-year partnership with 10 west-suburban school districts that was meant to help desegregate the schools. City school officials say the West Metro Education Program (WMEP) is not accomplishing its mission.

The city's possible departure raises some obvious questions: Without Minneapolis, can the program continue? And if it does fold, what's next for suburban districts?

We tried to pose those questions to suburban school districts, but it turns out talking about Minneapolis's discontent was not high on their priority list.

Attempts to reach the other districts involved were mostly ignored, even though the Minneapolis school officials had been quite critical of the suburban districts' desegregation efforts last week.

Minneapolis Superintendent Bill Green said WMEP was "clearly problematic," board member Pam Costain said she was "really running out of patience with WMEP," and board member T. Williams said that "almost from the beginning" of the partnership, "we were unable to focus on the original challenge of integrating and desegregating the schools."

In February, Superintendent Bill Green suggested that the district pull out of the partnership because it had failed to produce integrated schools that close the achievement gap between white and non-white students. But a community backlash led the school board to table the decision, and it will be put off a final resolution until Green's successor as superintendent is hired; Green is leaving at the end of the school year.

Program's future uncertain

It's unclear what would become of WMEP if Minneapolis left, because the district provides half the students who attend two schools run by the collaborative -- a fine arts school in Crystal and a downtown Minneapolis school.

"I don't know that they have really formally fleshed that out," said Gwen Jackson, the WMEP representative for the Edina School District and the district's director of human resources and administrative services.

The other member districts include Brooklyn Center, Columbia Heights, Eden Prairie, Hopkins, Richfield, Robbinsdale, St. Anthony-New Brighton, St. Louis Park and Wayzata.

According to Judy Farmer, who was on the Minneapolis school board when WMEP was established, the point was to desegregate some schools by drawing white suburban students into Minneapolis and drawing students of color into the suburbs.

"I think that a lot of the questions now are about whether it really worked to integrate or desegregate the suburbs or help Minneapolis," Farmer said. "[The downtown school] does not have many kids from the suburbs -- and the [Crystal] school does have Minneapolis kids, but they're all white."

Some parents say it works

WMEP parents argue that the two WMEP schools may not be perfectly integrated, but they're doing a better job than Minneapolis as a whole. The Crystal school is 69 percent white, compared with 33 percent at the downtown Minneapolis school. In Minneapolis, there are schools with enrollments that approach 90 percent of one race.

A Minneapolis parent who sends a child to the Crystal school e-mailed me this week to say that the school "has even made progress on the Holy Grail of modern education -- the ability to close the achievement gap."

Earlier this year, Myron Orfield, director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on Race and Poverty, released a memo that cited state data that show WMEP students of color outperformed students of color in Minneapolis and throughout Minnesota on state tests.

For instance, 42 percent of WMEP'S black students were proficient on state exams compared to 21 percent in Minneapolis and 31 percent statewide during 2007-08.

Green's complaints about the collaborative also include allegations that the district asked WMEP to modify its "inefficient and redundant administrative structures" -- like the fact that it has its own superintendent -- "especially in times of belt-tightening," but that instead WMEP raised the superintendent's salary, something Minneapolis board chairman Tom Madden called a "poke in the eye" to the Minneapolis schools.

WMEP Superintendent Daniel Jett didn't return phone calls seeking comment.

Part of the problem Minneapolis faces in integrating schools is the fact that, with 70 percent of its enrollment being students of color, "it cannot achieve either racial or economic integration in any serious way," said Steve Liss, the district's chief operations officer. There simply aren't enough white students in the district for it to integrate all of its schools.

Hopkins Superintendent John Schultz said last week that his district's achievement gap also concerns him, and he sees WMEP as one way the district is working to "collapse" the gap.

Edina Superintendent Ric Dressen said that as his district has become more diverse, it has benefitted from teacher training WMEP provides. The partnership "is just going to have to keep working and seeing what makes sense for each of our districts, and what make sense for districts as a whole," he said.

As for the possibility that Minneapolis might leave, "I'm not going to try to jump out in front of that," Dressen said. "We're going to have to take it step by step."

Emily Johns • 612-673-7460