Erin Gruwell said when she began as a high school teacher 20 years ago, her school district didn’t have pep rallies where principals dressed as horses and teachers sang and danced and beat on pots and pans.
The school district’s 1,537 employees gathered in the gym at Effingham County High School Friday to get fired up for the new school year. Classes begin on Wednesday.
Gruwell was the speaker, telling about her first year of teaching at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif. She inspired her students to do well despite being treated horribly by life and the educational system.
After learning about the Freedom Riders who fought against segregation in the Civil Rights movement, her students wrote about their experiences and called themselves “Freedom Writers.”
Hilary Swank played the part of Gruwell in the 2007 movie of that name. These days, Gruwell operates the Freedom Writers Foundation, instructing teachers how to implement her innovative lesson plans in their classrooms.
Gruwell said at the end of her first day of teaching, at the age of 23, she went to her principal to talk about the students.
“Who are these kids?” she asked. “Why are they so angry? Why are they so miserable and why are they trying to make me as miserable as they are? And they’re doing a really good job,” she said.
“We didn’t have a pep rally at the beginning of the year. We didn’t wear our colored shirts. We didn’t wave our flags and chant. Because my principal was jaded. He used words about ‘those kids’ and ‘them.’”
The principal told her that in a school district of 97,000 students, she had the worst, the kids who were supposed to drop out, “the kids who just came from boot camp or juvenile hall or those kids who just came from rehab for crystal meth or crack cocaine …. those kids who fell through the cracks and bounced around from group home to foster homes to shelters.”
All of her students scored poorly on standardized tests. She said her principal told her he hoped her students would drop out before they could pull down the standardized test score for the entire school.
“It felt like my cable being cut and my heart dropping to the floor,” she said. “I thought, where are these kids going to go? I’ve got 150 of them. And they’re not just going to disappear. They’re not just going to be invisible. They’re not going to go back to the margins. But how can I keep these kids in that classroom. How can I un-teach all that craziness that they’ve learned?”
Gruwell said she struggled to figure out how to reach the students, who saw her as “polka dots and pearls and perceived white privilege.”
“I am not a counselor. I am not a therapist. How am I supposed to help these kids change? I can’t do it alone so maybe we’ll do it together.” Like the song “We are Family,” that the Effingham school district employees played at the end of the rally, “We’re a family whether we like it or not. A dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless.”
She got the students talking by asking them about what movies and music they liked. Then she asked them to tell their stories, what their lives had been like.
One student came to school with a black eye, an ankle monitor and a probation officer. She was in the ninth grade and already had been to boot camp and juvenile hall again and again.
For her first assignment, that student wrote: “I hate Erin Gruwell, I hate Erin Gruwell, and if I wasn’t on probation, I would probably shank her!”
Gruwell said she grew up in suburbia and didn’t even know what “shanking” was. She said she looked it up and it wasn’t good.
One young man said his mother saved $25 for him to buy school supplies. But he was influenced by a friend not to be a “sellout” or a “school boy.” He and the friend used the money instead to buy a .38 special handgun. The friend told him about a game he’d seen on TV – Russian roulette. The friend put the gun to his head and blew his brains out.
Another student said she became jaded at the age of 5 when she watched her cousin, her hero, get shot five times in the back.
“She kept waiting for him to jump up because that’s what happens in cartoons and fairy tales, the good guy always makes it,” Gruwell said.
Although her students lived near Disneyland, the Happiest Place on Earth, and Hollywood and Rodeo Drive, they lived in what they called a “undeclared war zone.”
They were children who had been to more funerals than birthday parties. Every day, they wondered if they were going to make it home alive.
One boy, who was 14, had been in 42 foster homes.
Gruwell said she wanted her students to read books written by and for and about kids, such as the Diary of Anne Frank. But she said the chair of the English department was as jaded as the principal. She told Gruwell that her students were “dumb, stupid, nothing,” and that they would never read an entire book.
Gruwell went to a bookstore and bought copies of books using her own credit cards.
She bought plastic champagne glasses and sparking apple cider and asked her students to make a toast for change. She expected them to wish for reading an entire book, for filling in the correct bubbles on standardized tests, for writing the perfect essay.
Their wishes were far more fundamental – to not be 15 and pregnant like their mothers, to not spend a life behind bars like their fathers, to not die young like their brothers.
“They taught me a valuable lesson,” she said. “Don’t teach to a test, teach to me.”
Gruwell said teachers are not in it for the money, but for “that moment when a kid gets it. … I am an ordinary teacher who had an extraordinary experience with kids who went superman to make it.”
She said when she saw the Effingham employees dance and sing and do cheers, she felt hope and home. “I chose the best profession in the world, the most noble,” she said. Every student can be celebrated, can feel as if they have hope and as if they are at home, she said.
School Superintendent Randy Shearouse said after her speech that he hears all the time that people move to Effingham because of the schools. It’s not for the buildings, he said, but for the people who take care of their children.
He shared a number of facts about the Effingham school system:
--It’s 33rd largest school system in state of Georgia. Shearouse said he and Board Chairman Lamar Allen get invited to Atlanta to attend a big school system meeting. “We’ve never been, but we get invited anyway,” he said.
--The system has 5,011 elementary school students, 2,529 middle school students and 3,383 high school students, for a total of 10,923 students. With pre-K, the number goes to 11,500.
--The district has 19 sites, 2 million square feet under roof, on 826 acres of property.
--The Center for American Progress ranks Effingham as 23rd in the state as far as educational investment, out of 108 districts. Effingham spends $8,200 per child, as compared with $9,666 per child in Chatham. If Effingham spent as much as Chatham does per students, it would mean another $15 million dollars.
--The center gives Effingham a score of 93, with low expenses and high academic performance.
--The percentage of students meeting or exceeding standards was higher than the state average in every grade level and every content area.
--Effingham is in the top 30 percent of districts, in 27 of the 30 content areas tested in grades three through eight. Effingham is in the top 15 percent of districts in 20 of 30 content areas tested in grades three through eight.
--Out of 108 districts in the state, Effingham’s rankings were: ninth grade literature, 20; American Literature, 23; U.S. History, 14; Economics, 16; Biology, 18; Physical Science, 22; Coordinate Algebra,15; and Analytic Geometry, 31.
--The system’s 116 food service employees serve 9,000 meals a day, spending $1.6 million on food each year.
--The system’s buses travel more than 8,000 miles a day. They burn 7,000 gallons of diesel fuel each week. The district spends $5.5 million on transportation with another $1.1 million from the state.
--Graduation rates were 70.8 percent in 2006 and rose to 85.9 percent in five years. The way the rate was figured changed and it dropped to 79.7 percent, but that’s still over the state average of 71.8 percent.
--The school district is the largest employer in Effingham County, with 1,537 workers. One-fourth of them have more than 21 years of experience.
--The average years of experience for teachers is 14.
--The district has a budget of $89 million. Add education sales tax and federal dollars and that number is $104 million.
--The district has suffered $5 million in state reductions.
--Effingham County residents are paying less in property taxes than they did in 2007 because values have fallen.
--The Effingham district has had 190 school days for the last several years. Last year, 72 percent of the school systems in Georgia had fewer days than that.
--Health insurance for non-certified employees costs $4 million a year, up from $2 million in 2009.
--The district has 115 bus drivers. Of those, 97 carry health insurance.
--Of the district’s budget, 87 percent goes to salaries and benefits.
--Employees got a 3 percent cost-of-living raise this year, the first since 2008-2009. Half will be paid in November and the rest in May.
Energy One Federal Credit Union was a major sponsor of the event.