It was a weird site to see. Teenage students and parents parked in the back of Wal-Mart with a royal blue sign marked in white and congregating on a Saturday afternoon. They were suppose to be out at the movies, they were suppose to be sleeping in since there was no school, and they were suppose to raising chaos like normal teenagers do. But not these kids. Instead they dedicated their day to showing people that kindness still existed in the world. On Saturday, April 28 they came together in the Northwoods area to commit random acts of kindness.
At the end of every year the PALs students group up to do a big community service project. Juniors Taylor Peterson, Brooke Chambers, and Ruby Esparza had just the idea for their group. After some research they came up with the idea to dedicate a day to doing random acts of kindness for strangers and getting more than just the PALs kids involved in this community service project. They raised money at school to spend and made posters and flyers to spread the word of “Paying it Forward”. From 1 to 3:30 the students who signed up to participate drove around the area around Academy, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy and gave their kindness to pass on.
All the students and parents that participated in the days festivities gave away flowers to random people who looked like they needed it, toys to kids, they bought lunches for people, gave compliments and smiled at pretty much everyone that decided to go shopping on Saturday. And the reactions were quite shocking, everyone they came in counter with seemed to like the idea of doing something nice for random people and others even denied the offers. Telling the participants that there were people out there less fortunate than them to give the kindness to.
Once everyone spent their budgets and met back in the Wal-Mart parking lot at 3:30 they went over to the construction site, where the workers were burning under the Texas sun, to hand out water bottles and spread the word even further. Afterwards they congregated at a house to talk about how they “paid it forward”.
” Random Act of Kindness is a day designed to help encourage “pay it forward” and doing something nice for someone else to help them and the community.” junior Brooke Chambers said. “It made me feel happy seeing people our age going out of their way to help an elderly person or even a child and brightening their day.”
