LouAnne, a retired US marine, becomes a teacher in a Californian high school. But her mostly Latino and black students from an impoverished and racially segregated locality do not easily embrace her.
Maverick teacher John Keating returns in 1959 to the prestigious New England boys' boarding school where he was once a star student, using poetry to embolden his pupils to new heights of self-expression.
In New York City's Harlem circa 1987, an overweight, abused, illiterate teen who is pregnant with her second child is invited to enroll in an alternative school in hopes that she can re-route her life in a better direction.