When no one signed Brody Ridder’s yearbook, it broke his mother’s heart. As a result, she turned to social media for assistance. And what happened next had the mother in tears, but they were happy tears!Brody Ridder has had a difficult sixth grade year. The student at The Academy of Charter Schools in Westminster, Colorado, claims he has been bullied by his peers.”
They irritate me to the point where I cry at lunch and have to leave early because it’s getting on my nerves, and they’ve recently started getting physical, which I don’t like,” the boy explained. Nonetheless, Brody, like most kids, hoped that his classmates would sign his yearbook at the end of the school year. But when he returned home and showed the book to his mother, Cassandra Ridder, it broke her heart.Brody had two teachers’ signatures, but only two or three students agreed to sign the yearbook.’
“I went up to people and asked them can you sign my yearbook, and some of them were like no,” he recalled. Brody felt “useless” because his classmates were uninterested. In addition to his peers’ meager signatures, Brody penned a message to himself: “Hope you make some more friends. – Brody Ridder.” “It honestly broke my heart,” Cassandra admitted.
“And as a mother, that was extremely difficult to see and read.”Cassandra Ridder posted a photo of her son’s message on the school’s Facebook page for parents. Cassandra wasn’t the only one who was disappointed by Brody’s class’s lack of response as the image spread. A couple of high school students resolved to make things right.
“It’s so much fun having everyone sign your yearbook, and for this kid to only have people sign their names in his yearbook, it’s just soul-crushing,” upperclassman Simone Lightfoot said.”It was really heartbreaking to see people just sign their names like they were doing the bare minimum,” said another student, Joanna Cooper. Despite the fact that they’d never met the sixth-grader, these rising seniors gathered as many students as they could to sign his yearbook.
“We all just started planning the next day that we were going to go sign this kid’s yearbook,” Logan South explained.High school students flocked to sign the 6th grade yearbook. Brody Riddner received over 100 new signatures! Many of the messages contained encouraging words for the young man. And the gesture alone changed everything for the bewildered sixth-grader.
“It just made me feel better about myself.” I’m not sure how to put it. “It just makes me feel better inside,” Brody explained.And, of course, the gesture meant everything to the boy’s mother. “It made me feel like there’s hope for the school, hope for humanity, and there are a lot of good kids in this world,” Cassandra explained.
What a wonderful example these high school students have set. Cruelty will never go away in this broken world. But we can always fight back with good. As these high school students demonstrated, if something you see around you appears to be wrong, step up and make it right!