The book opens by establishing the setting: a diverse, at-risk classroom at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, where new teacher Erin Gruwell encounters students many at the school had effectively written off, given ongoing gang violence, poverty, and racial tension both inside and outside the classroom.

Key elements established in the opening:

• The students' diary entries, compiled and lightly edited into the book, reveal the severity of the violence, family instability, and daily survival challenges many of them faced well before entering Gruwell's classroom
• Gruwell's early struggles to reach a classroom initially resistant to both her and each other, given deep racial and gang-affiliated divisions among the students themselves, establish the significant obstacles the book's later transformation must overcome
• The book's structure — anonymous, first-person diary entries from individual students interspersed with brief context — immediately centers the students' own authentic voices rather than a purely teacher-centered narrative

This opening establishes both the severity of the students' circumstances and the format through which their transformation will be told directly in their own words.