Democracy Dies in Darkness

Classmates wouldn’t sign his yearbook. So older students stepped in.

An impromptu swarm of upperclassmen filed into the sixth-grade class to sign his yearbook

June 2, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Eleventh-graders at the Academy of Charter Schools in Westminster, Colo., with Brody Ridder, center, a sixth-grader at the school. After classmates declined to sign his yearbook, older students stepped in. (Courtesy of Simone Lightfoot)
6 min

Cassandra Ridder was crushed when her 12-year-old son Brody came home from school last week with only a few signatures in his yearbook — including his own.

“Hope you make some more friends. — Brody Ridder,” the rising seventh-grader wrote in his own yearbook, which was signed by only two classmates, two teachers and himself.