‘Freedom Writer’ brings inspiring message to Chesterfield high school

At age 5, she witnessed her cousin being shot five times. At 7, she pulled the needle from her uncle's arm after he overdosed. At 11, Maria Reyes became a third-generation gang member.

"I stand before you today, knowing that statistically I'm not supposed to be here," the Long Beach, Calif., speaker told an assembly of Meadowbrook High School students yesterday morning.

Reyes credits Erin Gruwell, an English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, with turning around her life and those of 150 other students now famously known as the Freedom Writers, about which a 2007 movie with the same name was based.

Yesterday, students at the Chesterfield County school received Reyes like a celebrity, snapping pictures with her and shouting out "I love you, Maria!" at one point.

Reyes, 29, will speak today to more than 300 Boys & Girls Clubs Keystone members at the Regional Youth Leadership Conference in Henrico County.

Troy Taylor, a social studies teacher, said he had his students in the Academic Success Program -- which enrolls at-risk students with social and economic challenges -- write about 50 letters to the Freedom Writers Foundation talking about the academic program and how the movie had inspired them.

Taylor told students yesterday that he was surprised to receive a call from the foundation with the news that Reyes would be coming to the school.

"My heart almost stopped because I couldn't believe it," he told students. "She changed her life. She became a success. You can see yourself in her."

Reyes became the first in her family to graduate from high school and college. She now works for the Freedom Writers Foundation, founded after the success of the best-selling book "The Freedom Writers Diary" to create opportunities for students to reach their full academic potential and aspire to higher education.

"So, if you get anything out of this today," she told students, "it's that somehow, no matter where you come from, the things that you made or the color of your skin or what people have told you, somehow at any given moment, you and you alone can make a choice to change your life."

Contact Juan Antonio Lizama at (804) 649-6513 or .