These Wichita students turned extra cookies into random kindness

Too many cookies.

It’s not a scenario that most high school students would view as a problem. They’d eat the cookies – some now, more later. Case closed.

But Armaan Ahmed and some classmates at Wichita East High School – members of the school’s Students Against Prejudice organization – saw their cookie windfall as an opportunity to spread a little lunchtime inspiration.

After Armaan scored a huge platter of cookies on clearance at a local grocery store Monday evening, the group, which meets every Tuesday, decided to hand them out to classmates along with confidence-boosting messages during lunch.

“East High is a better place because of you,” one of the slips of paper said.

“Students like you are why we are great,” said another.

“Smile – you deserve it.”

Armaan and another club officer, Saniya Ahmed (no relation), said they saw the impromptu project as a way to spread their message of inclusion, diversity and tolerance.

“It’s more important than ever for students to realize that they are not alone,” said Armaan, a senior and the club’s president. “There will always be a hand that’s reached out to them, regardless of their sexuality, their gender, their race, their ethnicity.

“Everything about them, we accept and embrace.”

Saniya said club members looked for peers who were eating lunch alone and tried to get to know them better.

“We were like, ‘Don’t just hand them a cookie and walk away.’ Actually engage in conversation. Say, ‘How is your day going?’ and simple things like that,” she said. “Maybe brighten their day.”

Earlier this year, the group held a rally on the school lawn to raise awareness about the value of diversity. They regularly have lunch and play games with students in the school’s autism program. And later this semester, they will help organize and promote East High’s annual Multicultural Assembly.

“We try to reach out in our own school community as an example of what needs to happen in the community as a whole,” Saniya said.

Armaan said the cookie giveaway, though unplanned this time, could become a regular activity.

“There’s no way that we could connect with all the students we would like to or who maybe need somebody to talk to,” he said. “So I could see us doing this again in the future.”

This story was originally published March 14, 2017 at 5:49 PM with the headline "These Wichita students turned extra cookies into random kindness."