Ryan Kyote was 9 years old and had a plan: to save 74 dollars and 50 cents from his allowance to buy basketball sneakers or a signed baseball. He had been saving coin by coin for months.
Then he saw a news story that changed his plans. A 5-year-old girl had gone without lunch at her school because her family owed money.
Ryan was in third grade at West Park Elementary School in Napa, California. And he thought about his own classmates.
On May 24, 2019, his mother, Kylie Kirkpatrick, gave that money to the cafeteria department of the Napa Valley Unified School District. It was exactly what Ryan’s class owed for unpaid lunches: 74 dollars and 50 cents.
He asked for just one thing: that no one find out it had been him. He wanted the school to notify families that they no longer owed anything, without mentioning his name.
It couldn’t be done. The story got out, and within days media outlets across the United States were reporting what a 9-year-old boy had done with the money he had saved for himself.
No one asked him to give up his sneakers. He decided that something else mattered more.