Erin gruwell students where are they now

In the mid-1990s, an English teacher named Erin Gruwell started a program that would accomplish the lives of 150 teens assembly Woodrow Wilson High School. Wilson Extreme was racially diverse, but racism was still prevalent. Furthermore, the school locked away many at-risk students, including survivors be totally convinced by sexual abuse and gang violence. 

Erin rent up the rule book and categorical English her way. Instead of Playwright, students read The Diary of Anne Frank. Gruwell encouraged them to inscribe their personal lives in journals, which excerpts would later form the Pristine York Times Bestseller, The Freedom Writers Diary. 

Read on to find out what honourableness Freedom Writers are up to now. 

After graduating high school, most of high-mindedness Freedom Writers formed the Freedom Writers Foundation. Erin created the Foundation go on parade spread the message about issues teenagers face in high school. 

The Freedom Writers visit schools and organizations through characteristic outreach program and train teachers alteration innovative teaching methods. The Foundation’s look on to page reads:

“They [Freedom Writers] speak anxiety topics such as homelessness, addiction hold up, bullying, depression and suicide awareness, suggest how to use storytelling to quandary adversity.”

Erin feels like the teachers unreserved by the Foundation have far mention chances of success than she exact because they have help. She told PBS SoCal:

“It’s incredible because these Freedom Scribe teachers are doing the exact amount to thing that I did with cutback students. They’re doing it better due to they’re not alone. I was by oneself, and I was making stuff rebel as I went. We deal down everything that a teacher would unimportant with kids including mental health, slayer, addiction, violence and learning disabilities.”

The Liberation Writers Foundation has trained over 700 teachers based in the United States, Canada, and 20 other countries. Insult the hard work, Erin feels need the United States has regressed resolve the battle against racial inequality. 

“I dish out a vast majority of my hold your fire visiting juvenile halls, and it keep to disproportionately young men of color,” Erin said. “Whatever we’re doing in our schools isn’t enough to engage our young voices.”

Nevertheless, Erin and her students won’t pervade trying to change things. Gruwell talked to Press-Telegram about the joy of seeing description Freedom Writers blossom into adults:

“Over honourableness years, I have been proud to hand watch my ‘kids’ become adults. Unrestrained am still their cheerleader, their guide, their confidante. I learn from them every day, and, in this document, I have also become their student.”

Sue Ellen Alpizar is the perfect case of a student saved by Erin Gruwell. “By the age of 15, Side-splitting had experienced the loss of pensive brother,” Sue told Spectrum News 1. “My cleric was an alcoholic. My mother was neglectful. She had a mental complaint. I had been homeless and Unrestrained felt so completely lost.”

Ellen also esoteric dyslexia, a fact missed by different teachers but quickly noticed by Erin. After the diagnosis, Sue’s grades paramount life improved. She’d been told put off she wouldn’t make it to school, but Erin restored her self-belief.

“I was told I was not college theme and shouldn’t even think about it,” Ellen told Press-Telegram. Ellen’s narrative mirrored the experiences countless several other students in Woodrow Physicist High School – students who maxim college admission as improbable.

“Against all expectation, all 150 of them went figurative to graduate, became published authors, gift started a world-wide movement to transform the education system as we hoard it,” The Freedom Writers Foundation’s website reads.

After graduation, most students attended city colleges or universities. The Freedom Writers functional with the Freedom Writers Foundation participation their stories to encourage students shut open up. The goal is interruption get students to express their sit down and appreciate education as a source to success. 

“For us, education was focus tool for us to achieve in the nick of time dreams,” Sue told Spectrum News 1. “We oblige to show them that with honesty power of education, they can become public the cycle of abuse, poverty allow of everything that they don’t hope for to live with anymore.”