NATCHEZ — Jaylan Green just likes helping people, and she was recently recognized for just that.

Green, 10, was awarded the Youth Ambassador of the year award from America Reads — Mississippi, an Americorps program.

America Reads — Mississippi places volunteer tutors in school reading classes. Through the program, some students are selected as junior AmeriCorps members.

Jaylan was one of the students selected at McLaurin Elementary School, and she said the group did many things including having meetings after school to learn about fire safety to community service painting the fence and cleaning the yard at Kyle’s House.

The junior members also did peer tutoring — in Jaylan’s case, she tutored third-grade math students. She was a fourth grader at the time.

“I gave up P.E. to do that,” she said.

For her, helping out only seemed to make sense in the grander scale of things.

“I felt good because I might need some help some day,” she said.

Jaylan’s road to winning the award began when she gave a speech at Kyle’s House about what Americorps meant to her on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, her mother Anita Green said.

“Jaylan didn’t want me to help with her speech because she said it would sound like a grown-up wrote it,” Anita said.

But one of the observers in the audience that day was affiliated with the America Reads — Mississippi, and they thought Jaylan did a fine job on her own, soon thereafter contacting her school about filling out a recommendation packet for the award.

“The next thing I know, they were asking me if they could come down and video and interview her,” Anita Green said.

And even though Jaylan was in the program just to do good, being recognized felt good, too, she said.

“I was jumping up and down when I heard,” Jaylan said. “I was running up and down the hall screaming.”

Jaylan will enter the fifth grade at Morgantown Elementary in the fall.

She is also the daughter of Jerome Green.