She Opened Their Eyes and They Opened Up Their Lives

They have endured murder among their classmates, poverty, dads doing time, moms doing drugs, sibling death, anorexia, dyslexia, racial prejudice and other plagues on their childhoods. Most of these kids had never before read a book for fun.

That was before they met Miss Gruwell at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach.

With the help of Erin Gruwell, a preppy-looking teacher from Newport Beach, 150 students at Wilson have now written their own book.

“An American Diary: Voices From an Undeclared War” is a spare and moving chronicle of life as these kids know it, where the city meets the suburbs at the edge of Orange and Los Angeles counties.

Inspired by Anne Frank in World War II and contemporary Bosnian teenage diarist Zlata Filipovic, the book is a series of journal entries written by students, filled with despair and--extraordinarily--hope.

So gritty are the stories, so risky their content, that not even Gruwell knows who wrote what. Otherwise, she would be bound by law to report the hardships and felonies to which her English students bear witness. (“His warm blood gushed out of his forehead, and spread slowly on my shirt,” reads one entry.)

They call themselves the Freedom Writers, in homage to the 1960s civil rights activists.

And what they have accomplished is remarkable. Not only the book, but better attendance, better grades, a trip to Washington, D.C. Now they’re trying to raise $500,000 to visit Holocaust sites in Europe next summer.

*

Beyond that, all 150 Freedom Writers--former taggers, gangbangers, dropouts, juvenile delinquents and others simply adrift in the sea of a big city high school--expect to be accepted to college. If the book gets published, proceeds will go to a nonprofit foundation to help pay their tuition.

They are buoyed by the faith of a wildly diverse group of more than 75 supporters, among them a Fountain Valley millionaire; Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family; “Schindler’s List” author Thomas Keneally and film director Steven Spielberg.

“They’re smart and bright and good people . . . who just were never given a chance,” says John Tu, co-founder of Kingston Technology Inc. of Fountain Valley, best known for giving, with his partner, $100 million to employees from the sale of the company.

Tu asked to meet the Freedom Writers through an employee who knew Gruwell; Kingston now employs several of the students.

What he has done for them, Tu says emotionally, “is nothing--nothing!--compared to what they have given me.”

While Wilson High classmate Jeremy Strohmeyer drew gasps of media attention in late May with his arrest on charges of raping and strangling a 7-year-old at a Nevada casino, the Freedom Writers returned from the nation’s capital to hold a candlelight vigil for the victim.

In Washington, they had hosted U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley at dinner, moving him to tears by presenting him with their book. Later, they held a candlelight vigil at the Washington Monument for all victims of senseless violence.

Gruwell hopes to instill in her students two things: the knowledge that one person can change the world, and that each of them is that person. Already, the Freedom Writers mentor younger students in the community and speak to aspiring teachers about tolerance and looking beyond skin color.

Long Beach Unified School District Supt. Carl A. Cohn says of the Freedom Writers, “They make people like me remember why we got into this business.”

While no one can predict the students’ future until after June graduation and severing of the umbilical cord with Gruwell, Cohn says, “Now we see students of Erin’s with a purpose . . . coming to school every day, getting better grades . . . students who want very much to play the game of college application.”

*

A note passed around her class during her first year of teaching was a turning point for Gruwell. It was 1993, and she was a student teacher at Wilson High, assigned to her own classroom. It was not an easy time.

Wilson is home to a head-on collision of race, economics and culture. White kids, black kids, Cambodian and Spanish-speaking immigrants whose parents work three jobs to pay the rent. Kids who, if they don’t have bus money, walk several miles to school. Kids who have seen people cut down by bullets in their yards. Kids with beachfront homes and cell phones and Jeep Cherokees.

One of Gruwell’s students had transferred in after pointing a gun at a previous teacher.

Slowly, the realization hit Gruwell that, as they did with each other, her students had sized her up in stereotype: White. Yuppie. And those self-important suits!

One day she intercepted a note being circulated among her English students. It contained a crude and demeaning caricature of one boy in the class.

Gruwell exploded. This stereotyping, she told them, is exactly the kind of thing that led to Jews being killed in the Holocaust. The response? Blank stares.

“How many of you,” she asked, “know what the Holocaust is?” No hands. “Really?” she asked. “Seriously?” No hands. My God, she thought, is this possible?

And so began the Freedom Writer journey. Gruwell, all of 23, threw out the year’s lesson plan to concentrate on tolerance as an overarching classroom theme. First up: a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance and reading “Schindler’s List.”

Learning that there was no money allocated for student teachers, Gruwell paid for the trip herself; she didn’t want to let her students down now that she had their attention. That meant moonlighting during the December break as a lingerie salesclerk at Nordstrom and as a concierge at the Newport Beach Marriott, where she still works on Sundays.

*

On their museum tour, the kids heard a Holocaust survivor describe atrocities she suffered at Auschwitz--drinking urine and eating toothpaste to survive, being attacked by a guard dog.

Gruwell knew the trip was worth every hour of watching women try on Wonderbras.

“My kids saw that all they’d been through--and it is a lot--was insignificant to what [this woman] had gone through. It was an epiphany for the class. We went there as strangers; we came back as a family.”

“Schindler’s List” had been brought to life.

Hearing of an incident in Oakland in which teenagers were escorted out of a screening of “Schindler’s List” for mocking it, Gruwell wanted to show that not all “inner-city” kids behave insensitively. So she took the kids to see the film in Newport Beach.

At a nearby market, a few of them were patted down for weapons and stolen items. At a restaurant, some waiters were reluctant to serve Gruwell’s group. When the Daily Pilot wrote about the visit and the fallout, the newspaper and Gruwell received hate calls from white supremacists. The Pilot wrote about that, too.

“Schindler’s List” author Keneally read the story and invited the students to an all-day tolerance forum he was hosting at UC Irvine, where he was teaching writing. He would later arrange for a daylong visit to Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company.

Anyone who’s around Gruwell, says Polly Stanbridge of Newport Beach, who volunteered for the Freedom Writers team after reading the Daily Pilot story, “gets on the bandwagon with her.”

Hired full time in her second year, Gruwell got approval for a pilot program that started with five classes of ninth-grade English students. Those are the ones who will graduate next year.

Her students read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and began corresponding with two of Anne’s friends and with Miep Gies; the three visited their school. A read-athon fund-raiser was held to bring Filipovic, the young Bosnian writer, to Wilson High.

The Freedom Writers speak of a teacher who has taught them to love learning.

Sometimes, said Tiffony Jacobs, 17, almost apologetically, “I’ve felt like I want to kill myself, just jump off a building.” Her family has frequently been unable to afford a telephone or even gas for cooking. But she has been inspired by Gruwell to want to teach.

“Miss Gruwell,” she says, “she’s like a best friend, or a sister . . . or a favorite aunt.”

Of their legion of supporters, perhaps the most openly adored has been Tu.

When Freedom Writers held a parent-student basketball game to raise money to aid Bosnian children, Tu rented the Pyramid at Cal State Long Beach and he and Kingston employees played surrogates for students who don’t know where their fathers are. The kids are awe-struck that someone so successful should care about them.

*

It has taken persistence and faith--faith that some might call naive--for a young educator to make it all happen. With her gift for inspiring students and volunteers, it’s no surprise that Gruwell was named LBUSD’s 1997 Teacher of the Year.

“There is no guile to Erin; she’s the real thing,” says Supt. Cohn, himself a product of Long Beach’s mean streets. “That’s why so many of us say yes.”

Debbie Mayfield, whose son, Dane, 17, is in his fourth year as a Gruwell student, thinks Gruwell is “an angel.”

“Dane is a good boy, but he can be a bad boy, and we were right at a crossroads with him, and having problems. She mentored our whole family, really, bridged the gap between us. . . . The kids would do anything for her.”

Liz Onukaegbe recalls with glee how son Byron, returning from his first day as a freshman, announced: “Mom, I have a teacher who is out of this world. Mom, Miss Gruwell’s gonna get me into college.”

Class often spills over into evening. After one late-night session, as Gruwell and several students were carrying out her computer, having printed out manuscripts of “An American Diary,” police screeched up, prepared to arrest her for theft until a parent stepped forward to vouch for her.

While several publishers have been impressed with the book’s human drama, they worry whether it would sell. At least one suggested reframing the story around Gruwell, a sort of white female version of “Stand and Deliver.”

Gruwell is not interested. In fact, anxious that her efforts not be misconstrued as self-serving, she has set up a nonprofit foundation with herself, students and Filipovic as directors. Funds can be spent only on students’ college expenses.

Her dream is to establish a charter school for the Long Beach district--with some of her Freedom Writers returning to help run it.

She has the support of Cohn, who marvels that Gruwell is teaching her kids not only about literature and filling out a college application, but also “the nuts and bolts of working the system. They are handling superintendents of schools, corporate executives, Cabinet officers, and they’re not gonna lose that if she goes out of their lives.”

*

* Donations to the Freedom Writers can be sent to the Tolerance Education Foundation, c/o Don Parris, 2029 Century Park East, Suite 4000, Los Angeles, CA 90067.