Students at a high school were devastated to learn that one of their 15-year-old classmates had taken his life. His name was Kwadwo Boateng. One classmate, Erica English, said:
“He was always happy and smiling. He was really funny and always cracking jokes. Everyone loved him.”
“… No one ever expected this to happen. It was shocking to everyone in the whole school. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Everyone was sad and you could tell when people walked down the halls that it hit them really hard.”
A group of six of his classmates, Anna Aronson, Michelle Crispin, Erica English, Nick Krueger, Ellie Uematsu and Jessica Morse came up with a great plan to honor Boateng.
They wrote positive notes on post-its and put them on everyone’s lockers. They did one for each of the 3,600 students in the school.
The personalized each one. Each one started with “You are…” and they added kind words to each one.
They got permission from their teachers and kept the school open one day. They stayed at the school from 2:30 p.m. until 10 p.m.
Crispin said:
“When it started to get late, we got a little worried about getting it all done. But we wanted to commit to the project and stay as long as needed to make sure everyone got what they deserved.”
“One of the things that inspired us to do this was that Kwadwo was such a positive person. He always wanted to spread so much joy and make people happy and we really looked up to him for that. We just wanted to do what he would have done for the world.”
Uematsu said:
“We just wanted to get the message across that people belong. Because it is such a big school and it’s hard to feel included sometimes. We just wanted to make everyone feel together and that they are not alone.”
This is a beautiful gesture that these students did. There is no one way to grieve, but bringing people together is a great thing. We can help each other.
Here is a public service announcement for an organization called Trevor Talk To me. It is for National Suicide Prevention month:
Featured image by Steven Depolo via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
