A swarm of bikers rode down to a Nova Scotian elementary school this week in a bid to make life better for a bullied fourth grader.
The story starts with that of Xander Rose, a 10-year-old Indigenous boy in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Rose was mercilessly teased and bullied by his fellow kids for his weight, ethnicity, looks, clothes and other things. Rose’s mother told CTV that he was even jumped on the bus. The bullying got so bad that the boy was praying for the school year to end.
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“We were watching him withdraw,” Katie Leyboldt, Xander’s mother, told the CBC. “He didn’t want to come to school, didn’t want to come out of his bedroom most days.”
Leyboldt searched everywhere for answers which included the school board, her MLA, and Children’s Aid but she just kept hitting a wall. Then, she called in the bikers. Leyboldt decided to contact some a US-based group called Defenders of Children which is a biker club that works with abused kids. The Defenders contacted some Cape Breton bikers who immediately started organizing through a Facebook post. On it they explained Xander’s situation and described him as “future biker, [who] loves his biker gear.”
“Can we get a crew together for a ride to meet up with Xander and his family and maybe give him a ride to school some time, in numbers, as a sign to kids and teachers that he’s much loved and has a very protective family on two wheels,” reads the post.
Well, god dang, if upon seeing that the Defenders of Children didn’t pull together for Xander. The number of bikers who wanted to help out the bullied little boy was in the hundreds and they all made their way to Sydney.
The crew did a practice ride last week and made the rally reality on Wednesday morning when around 200 bikers escorted a custom leather-sporting Xander to school. Some of the organizers called the show of support a “wall of leather and steel” for the boy. Another organizer, Mike Basso, told the CBC that he hopes the show of support helps out Xander’s self esteem.
“All these people are his sisters and brothers,” Basso told the CBC. “He’s one of us. If they have a problem with him, they have a problem with us.”
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