Meet this week’s Kidsburgh Kind Kid: Elwood Paracat

In the months since we began sharing stories of Kidsburgh Kind Kids, we’ve heard about children as young as preschool age making their community a better place.

But as you may have seen in our story about Clark Ehman, there are also plenty of high-schoolers and middle-schoolers out there every day making the Pittsburgh region a better place in their own ways.

Recently, we heard from a parent named Andy Kubis about a middle-schooler who made a special effort to help Andy’s son Nate.

“Kindness doesn’t stop at elementary school,” Andy told us in response to our call for Kidsburgh Kind Kids. “I’d like to nominate Elwood Paracat, a sixth-grader at Arsenal Elementary School. He recently helped my fourth-grader, Nate, get comfortable riding bikes at the Wheel Mill. My son Nate has always been a little nervous about bikes, but Elwood took the time to teach him some skills to become more confident and they ended up having a great time riding around together.”

This is just the kind of small but meaningful choice that we were looking for when we introduced the Kidsburgh Kind Kid initiative.

“Elwood could have easily stuck with the big kids at the bike park who are doing tricks and showing off. But he was happy to stay in the skills-building area with Nate until he got comfortable enough to try some other areas of the Wheel Mill,” Andy says. “It was a really nice gesture of an older middle school kid helping an elementary school kid, and I was very appreciative!”