They thought she was a cheerleader from hell who was there to spoon-feed them, Erin Gruwell said.

When she began reading the stories of people such as Anne Frank to her class, that all changed. In 1994, her class learned the power of sharing stories and began telling their own through their diaries.

In 1999, Gruwell, a high school teacher from Long Beach, assembled these stories and published "The Freedom Writers Diary," which was a New York Times Bestseller.

Monday, Gruwell and two Freedom Writers, Maria Reyes and Sue Ellen Alpizar, spoke to students in Elsinore High School’s Peer Counseling Program.

Their speeches emphasized the importance of writing stories.

"There’s something really liberating about writing, but it’s also terrifying when [a story] is out there," Gruwell told the class. "Now you can’t suppress it; now you can’t pretend."

Through their stories, Gruwell’s students were able to see what they each had in common and were able to overcome their prejudices.

"All I needed to know was that there were people just like me," Reyes, now 27, told the students at the gathering.

"If a student knows the story of another kid on campus, it’s hard to discriminate," Cameron Lymon, a guidance councilor at EHS and co-founder of the Peer Counseling Program, said in an interview last week.

Lymon and Chip Roberson, a psychology teacher at the school, started a peer counseling club in 2004. They modeled their club after the Murrieta school district’s Peer Leaders Uniting Students program.

Elsinore’s club has since grown into a course in which more than 150 students participate.

In the classes, students record in journals – a technique inspired by the Freedom Writers. They also listen to lectures by guest speakers that reinforce the themes of the class.

Last year, René Firestone, a Holocaust survivor, spoke to the class about the importance of tolerance.

The program serves as a kind of therapy for the students, said Lymon.

"Before this class I never wrote in a journal. I get angry fast and am really emotional and when I write in my journal I feel like I get weight off my shoulders. When I talk to people they can talk back but Advertisement

[ Chatton and Associates ] with my journal I can get it all out," Rocio Vasquez, 17, a senior in the class, said in an interview last Friday.

It serves such a function for at least one of the Freedom Writers. "I started writing and through that process I slowly emerged from my shell," Alpizar, now 28, told the students. "It’s horrible to be alone; it’s horrible to not trust anyone."

Journaling also teaches the students appreciation of the art of storytelling, according to Lymon.

"The whole theme behind [the course] is the stories themselves and to have people appreciate what a good story is," he said.

Another goal of the course is to build relationships between students. According to Vasquez, the class meets this goal well.

"We’ve become a family without even knowing it," she said. "We act like a family. We get mad at each other, but we still love each other no matter what."

In this way, the Elsinore class resembles Gruwell’s class. "There was family there, a family I could trust… it became the trust I never had and it was the most wonderful thing," Alpizar said.

In addition to the relationships the course builds between students, it builds relationships between teachers and students, Roberson said in an interview Monday.

"For students – young girls especially – it’s nice to have somebody on campus to talk to about any issues they have, whether they be academic, personal or emotional," he said. "That makes the school just a little bit better."

This is as good for teachers as it is for students, according to Lymon.

"It’s good for teachers too, because they build relationships with students," he said. "When you stop and listen to a kid’s story, that can move mountains."

The school funded the program for the first time this year, but both Lymon and Roberson voiced concern about the future of the course in light of the district’s recent budget cuts.

"The more support we get, the more things we can do like this for our kids," Lymon said.

"Next year, if it goes that way, we’ll still do what we do but we’ll just have to try to raise some money," said Roberson.