Erin Gruwell speaks to teachers on opening day

Vernon - Erin Gruwell held an audience of close to 700 Vernon teachers and others in rapt attention as she drew them into her odyssey from a 23-year-old, newly-minted teacher “with white pearls, white polka dots, with white suburban values” to freedom fighter for 150 high school students “written off by the education system and deemed unteachable.” Working with a group of troubled students in the early 1990s, Gruwell coached them to become readers and ultimately writers. The book of their autobiographical stories became a best-seller and a movie starring Hillary Swank. A charismatic speaker who preaches her good news like a tent evangelist, Gruwell had her Vernon audience in tears with heart-rending descriptions of how she found a powerful way to use words to save young lives lived without hope in the “undeclared war zone” of the ghettoes and barrios of Long Beach, Calif. She was the guest speaker at the convocation for educators on Sept. 5, before the school year officially began. Gruwell began teaching when racial tensions were high, gang warfare and crime were rife, families were shattered by violence, and kids had been to more funerals than birthday parties. It was a little more than a year after the four-day-long May 1992 riots had ripped Los Angeles apart, leaving $1 billion in damage, 55 dead and 2,383 injured. The riots had been sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers a passerby videotaped beating taxi driver Rodney King during an arrest. The students in Gruwell’s classes were street-smart, book-hating grifters, cynical about value of education and contemptuous of adult authority. Some had criminal records. Nearly all had hearts and souls scarred by memories of blood, violence and suffering, of friends and relatives gunned down on mean streets where human life counted for little, and the “gangsta” was king. In despair about how to reach these kids who didn’t want to read books by “white men in tights,” Gruwell seized upon “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and got an advance from home on her Christmas money to buy the 150 copies she needed. The “Diary” led her to make the breakthrough of a lifetime, when her students were riveted - and despite poor reading skills - surged on to complete the book as they discovered echoes in their own lives of Frank’s years lived as a prisoner in the Amsterdam attic where her family hid from the Nazis during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. Then Gruwell began moving her students from strength to strength, and book to book. Next came “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of his experience of the Holocaust, and Zlata Filipovic’s “A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo.” Inspired by the dairies, Gruwell’s students started pouring out the tales of their own lives into a series of diary entries, published in 1999 as “The Freedom Writers Diary,” with a foreword written by Zlata Filipovic, the child of Sarajevo. The book climbed the New York Times bestseller list, and Gruwell and her students vaulted to national fame. The book’s title is a play on “freedom riders,” a group of black and white civil rights workers who transformed the civil rights movement in 1961, when they set out in buses for the Deep South to defy Jim Crow laws, relying Ghandi-inspired non-violent resistance in facing down mob violence and mass arrest. Today, a number of the students in the original group of 150 have graduated from high school, some have gone on the college, and several have become or are planning to become teachers. One girl, now a college graduate, says she intends to become the U. S. secretary of education. This past January a film version of the book appeared featuring Academy Award-winning Hillary Swank, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Gruwell. The film now is available on DVD. “Erin’s presentation provided the very best opening we have had to date; each school year opening seems to get better and better, a fact that I am most proud of,” said Vernon Superintendent Anthony Macerino. He described her as talk as the “jump start that we all need as we return from a lengthy summer recess.” Although the situation in Sussex County is different from inner-city Los Angeles, Vernon School Board President Harold Whidden commented that, “The principles she believes in and lives by as a teacher apply not only to inner-city students from fractured families, but to kids anywhere. We have many kids right here in Vernon who would respond to this kind of teaching.” Macerino said that the $13,000 fee paid for Gruwell, as for all convocation speakers, was paid through funds from “No Child Left Behind,” the Federal Title II Professional Development program. The district must use these funds strictly for professional development, including tuition, speakers, workshops, and the like. A portion of the fee will go to Gruwell’s Freedom Writers “Foundation. In addition, the district will pay Gruwell’s travel and lodging expenses. Gruwell has appeared with some of her students on Oprah, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, Prime Time Live with Connie Chung, Good Morning America, as well as on National Public Radio, among others. Today, she is president of the Freedom Writer’s Foundation, a non-profit group that works to keep students in school by fostering their growth as writers through the method Gruwell pioneered In a final word to the teachers, Gruwell said, “Come tomorrow morning, when those kids come to your class, may each of you do what you have to do to reach them, to teach them, and to teach them what to do with those wings of theirs.” The teachers filed out, many with eyes still red from weeping, to buy autographed copies of Gruwell’s books. “Teach with your Heart: Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers” (2007) was a favorite. Special Education Teacher Jennifer Robine of Cedar Mountain School, who was buying an autographed copy, said she now has more tools to use in continuing to reach her students.