A 9-year-old California boy used money he had been saving from his allowance since Christmas to pay for his classmates’ school lunch debts for the entire third grade class.
Ryan Kyote would normally have spent his money on baseball cards according to his mom Kylie Kirkpatrick.
But one morning while eating breakfast he heard on the news that a little girl in Indiana was forced to return her hot lunch after learning she didn’t have enough money in her student account.
Kirkpatrick remembers Ryan asking “How can a five-year-old owe a school money?”
She called West Park Elementary School in Napa, California to find out the district’s policies on school lunches. Although the school doesn’t turn away students who can’t pay for school lunches, Kirkpatrick discovered students can accrue debt that is then billed to their parents at the end of the year.
She told USA Today — “As a single parent I’m pretty strict on finances,” “If I was to receive a bill of $100 at the end of the year that would be hard for us.”
She relayed the information to Ryan after he got home from school, along with the fact that his own classmates in the third grade owed $74.50 in lunch debts. That’s when he decided he wanted to use his allowance to pay the bill.
Ryan’s selfless act has spurred others to do the same on a larger scale. The yogurt maker Chobani has contributed 85 thousand dollars to a school district in Idaho to also pay off lunch debt.