MANKATO — In a fiery meeting Thursday, students and staff from Minnesota State University’s College Access Program met with Minneapolis civil rights leaders to devise a strategy to convince the university to cover tuition bills from summer courses for some and meal plans from this semester for others.

The students believe they’ve been lied to. The civil rights leaders and College Access Program staff believe their students are going through such financial-aid struggles because the institution is racist and cares less about them than white students.

“I can prove discrimination across the board,” said Spike Moss, a Minneapolis activist and founder of a group called Uhuru Solutions.

The university, meanwhile, says it has tried to accommodate the students, and they say they’ve reinstated meal plans for all College Access Program students.

The College Access Program gives high school students who may not have qualified academically for college admission a second chance. In a highly monitored environment, they are coached on how to succeed in college. The program targets students of color, first-generation students, students from underepresented groups and from low-income families.

“We are making exceptions for the CAP students that we are not making for the more than 300 other students at the university who are in the same situation,” said MSU spokesman Michael Cooper.

If meal plans are being reinstated, student Ubenti Tepi-Ra doesn’t know it. After the meeting, she accepted $25 from CAP Director Tonya Phillips, and said she’s had to borrow $50 from her sister in Minneapolis.

Moss and others came to MSU to meet with the students, who say they’ve been trying to get the administration to deal with the financial aid situation for several weeks.

The group hopes to set up a series of meetings with high-level MSU administrators and get answers to why students still are having trouble with financial aid.

Eight students from the College Access Program were notified recently that their meal plans have been discontinued because of failure to pay fall semester bills. Again, the university says it has reinstated those meal plans.

Twenty-two students still owe on courses they enrolled in last summer. Their combined debt totals about $30,000, according to CAP staff.

And several students say MSU President Richard Davenport told them he would donate his annual bonus, which this year totaled $6,000, to the problems of the CAP students.

Some of the students said they’d been told the financial aid problems would be “taken care of.” As of Thursday, they hadn’t been, and the students believe that equates to dishonesty.

The Free Press was unable to contact Davenport directly for this report.

In Thursday’s meeting the Minneapolis group brainstormed ways to raise the money to cover that $30,000. They said they may approach groups such as the Minneapolis Foundation and the Minnesota Vikings — both of which MSU deals with regularly — and ask for cash contributions.

CAP staff said Moss and the others have taken a special interest in helping the CAP students because many of the students come from Minneapolis and are the first from their families to attend college.

Tepi-Ra shared the e-mail she received from the university regarding her meal plan: “Be aware that unpaid residence hall charges will result in having your meal plan and/or flex plan privileges SUSPENDED on or after Monday, October 26, 2009,” an e-mail from Student Financial Services reads. “Reinstatement will occur after full payment is received. Having a meal plan and/or flex plan suspended does not relieve you of your responsibility to pay your Fall Semester 2009 residence hall contract charges in full.”

Cooper said the university is willing to work with all CAP students who are experiencing trouble with any part of their financial aid. But he said that since the administration advised all CAP students to come to the financial aid office to speak one on one with a financial aid representative, none of the CAP students have done so.

Tepi-Ra said she tried to set up such a meeting but was told by staff at the financial aid office and the Campus Hub that they couldn’t help her.

CAP officials have said the only option left to students is taking out a loan, an option that makes their situation worse by piling up debt.

But Cooper said that for any student who went through the verification process and missed the deadline, the options may be limited to loans.

The loans students are being directed to consider require co-signers. Tepi-Ra’s only chance for a co-signer is her mother. But she said her mother, recently split from her stepfather, is financially incapable of helping her pay for school and will not be able to co-sign a loan.

She says she also filled out a form that allows students struck with special circumstances to appeal their financial aid award and, if successful, get more.

Her stepfather’s income was included when she applied for fall semester financial aid. But now he and his income are out of her family’s income picture.

Moss’ talk to the group was impassioned.

He cautioned them to be wary of trusting any deals struck with the administration: “This is Minnesota. You made 400 treaties with the Native Americans and broke all of them.”

He told them that sometimes we have to win battles at home before we can move on: “Ali said it best. He said, ‘I ain’t going (to Vietnam). Ain’t no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.’ ”

And when Tepi-Ra, talking about her frustration and exhaling deeply after saying, “I’m tired,” Moss told them about a day decades ago in an Alabama town when most of the black adults in town had been thrown in jail for rebelling against racist ways.

He told them the children of that town got together, locked arms and marched into the town square without the protection of their parents, afraid, but still willing to fight.

“Don’t get tired,” Moss said. “Don’t go throw in no towel.”