Fund-Raiser Rewards Students for Lessons

National University of Costa Mesa is giving back to a diverse group of 150 high school students who have helped aspiring teachers this year learn cultural and language sensitivity: The university will host a benefit golf tournament June 15 at Mesa Verde Country Club in Costa Mesa.

The students attend Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach but have been embraced by the university since their English teacher, Erin Gruwell of Newport Beach, started bringing them a few years ago to her National evening course called “The Diverse Classroom.”

The Wilson students, a diverse cross-section of race, religion and income levels, kept journals last year chronicling their upbringings, and their stories will be published in 1999 by Doubleday as part of a book on their four years together. Calling themselves the Freedom Writers in homage to the old Freedom Riders civil rights group, the students will use proceeds from the book to pay their college tuitions. Many hope to attend Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

As a last chapter to their book, the students hope for a July visit to several Holocaust sites in Europe that they have studied. Having read and been inspired by “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the Wilson students befriended the Amsterdam woman who hid the Frank family from the Nazis, and as sophomores raised money to fly Miep Gies to visit.

To help the Freedom Writers get to Holocaust sites, National University has already involved several local companies, including C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, in the all-day charity golf tournament. Winners will receive prizes that range from sports-related merchandise to golf vacation packages to nights out with movie and theater tickets.

“Erin has taught a number of different courses and has had contact with hundreds of students here at National, and she also stays in contact with them,” says Dave Waller, National’s student services director and organizer of the golf tournament. He said Gruwell is a valued instructor whose efforts to pair aspiring teachers as mentors to her high school students have created long-term partnerships. “She really builds a good network of people and some of our students may chaperon on the Europe trip.”

Other fund-raisers for the students include a two-hour “Together for Tolerance” concert tonight in Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach, preceded by a home-cooked multicultural feast. The students will perform ballet folklorico, Cambodian and Native American dance, stepping, rap and poetry. There will also be a video montage of their experiences together. Tickets for the show, available at the box office, are $10 for adults, $5 for children. Food tickets are $8 each.