Idealistic teacher Erin Gruwell is just starting her first teaching job at Woodrow Wilson High School, which, two years earlier, implemented a voluntary integration program. Despite choosing the school on purpose because of its integration program, Erin is unprepared for the nature of her classroom, whose students live by generations of strict moral codes of protecting their own at all cost. Many are in gangs and almost all know somebody that has been killed by gang violence. The Latinos hate the Cambodians who hate the blacks and so on. Erin inspires her class of at-risk students to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue education beyond high school.