After seeing a five-year-old boy in a wheelchair get wet while waiting for the school bus in the winter, teenagers built a shelter for him.

Ryder Killam, 5, has been exposed to rain, wind, and snow every day for about 15 minutes, with only a patio umbrella for protection.

When local students in Bradford, Rhode Island, learned of his predicament, they built a bus shelter for the bottom of his driveway during their construction classes.

“Ryder uses it daily before school, and his nurses wait in it daily for his return home,” Tim, Ryder’s father, said.

He also likes to use it as a fort from time to time.

This project demonstrated that there is still a lot of good in the world and in this town.

Ryder was born with spina bifida myelomeningocele and was unable to walk.

He stated that he began using a wheelchair at the age of two…

He started inclusionary preschool at Dunn’s Corner Elementary in June 2019, and his parents Tim and Nikea had to push him 75 feet to the end of the road every day to wait for his school bus.

Ryder frequently had to wait up to 15 minutes outside in whatever weather he was in because he couldn’t race for the bus like his peers if he was late.

Tim decided to put a patio umbrella at the end of his driveway in September of this year, just as Ryder started kindergarten.

“The trouble with the wind and autumn weather in New England is that it wasn’t particularly successful unless it was a rainy day with no wind; otherwise, he would still get wet and chilly,” he explained.

They decided to walk out into their neighborhood to see if anyone had any ideas for safeguarding Ryder from the elements.

“I put a plea on Facebook to see if any of my friends or their contacts owned an old bus hut,” Tim, who runs a nautical electronics company, explained.

“I observe them irregularly on people’s properties and assumed that whoever owned them had grown children who no longer needed it.

“After the post, a WPS member suggested I contact the Westerly High School construction class to see if they would be interested in building Ryder a bus stop hut.”

Tim emailed Dan McKena, who has taught construction technology at Westerly High School for the past 27 years, to see if he would be interested in this type of project.

“He said, ‘Sure,’ and then partnered with his students to design and build the hut,” he explained.