In Forest Lake, a study in school collaboration

Rachel Pierce and Gail Wilkey-Diez compare notes over coffee on how to better teach Spanish.

That would be an unremarkable moment between two teachers, except that Pierce is a public school teacher for Forest Lake Area Schools and Wilkey-Diez is a charter school teacher at Lakes International Language Academy (LILA), also in Forest Lake.

Charter schools in Minnesota were originally intended as laboratories for public schools. New concepts and ideas would be tested in charter schools and successful ones would be shared with public school districts.

But it hasn't really turned out that way. Usually they operate in different orbits, with little collaboration and some tension and suspicion keeping them apart. But a Forest Lake initiative has changed that, and it's attracting national attention.

The charter school there helps the public school district interview and train teachers, share innovative ideas and even write the district's curriculum.

Forest Lake administrators took on the initiative in 2008 when they recognized that recruiting students from the immersion program might reverse their dwindling student population. Charter and public administrators have designed a transition program that allows graduates of the charter school to continue at the district's middle school with public funds. National researchers have visited the school in hopes of replicating the program elsewhere.

"Forest Lake captures the essence of what we want to see happen," said Marianne Lombardo, the vice president of Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which held a conference recently on public and charter collaborations. "The district is using the charter school as a basket of innovation to spur some interesting things. They're meeting the kids' needs by having adults put their differences aside and coming together."

So far, it's been an uneasy relationship in most districts nationwide. Public school officials often see charter schools as attempting to de-unionize and privatize education, and many charter school officials see public schools as bureaucracies infested with red tape.

Last year, the federal government set aside $6.7 billion to encourage more collaborations between charter and public schools. Several city public schools, including Minneapolis, signed agreements with their local charter school organizations last week.

Parents founded the Lakes International Language Academy in 2004 after Forest Lake school board members rejected a proposal to start an immersion program in the district. The program swelled over the years. When students began to graduate from the school, parents and teachers feared the students would lose their Spanish skills.

About the same time, Forest Lake's public schools started losing hundreds of students and, like other districts, money became tight.

In the new collaboration, the charter school, which serves kindergartners through sixth-graders, would allow the district's junior high schools to heavily recruit from its student body. In exchange, the charter school would help Forest Lake's Southwest Junior High create a set of immersion classes exclusively for its graduates. LILA graduates now have their own advisory class at Southwest, a Spanish culture class, industrial technology immersion class and an immersion social studies course.

The number of students who decide to stay in Forest Lake for junior high has increased in the past few years from seven in 2008 to 24 this year.

"We have found a way to make this a win-win situation," said Cam Hedlund, the principal of Lakes International Language Academy. "It's really about the kids and not about who's serving them but how we're serving them."

Daarel Burnette II • 651-735-1695