Yanke team named Trucker Buddies of the Month
SASKATOON — The trucking team of Tracey Alf and Sean Dillon from Arnprior, Ont. have a lot to teach second-graders in Clifton Park, N.Y.
That’s why the couple — who drive for Saskatoon-based Yanke Transport — was recently named the ACS MultiMedia Trucker Buddy Driver of the Month.
“Tracey and Sean are super buddies,” wrote teacher Amy Donohue in the nomination letter. “I could not have asked for a better set of pen pals. I’ll let them know the topics we are working on, and they find a way to include real life examples of it in their e-mails.”
Trucker Buddy International is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping educate and mentor schoolchildren via a pen pal relationship between professional truck drivers and children in grades two through eight. The program matches classes of students with professional truck drivers from across North America, and every week drivers share news about their travels with their class.
Once a month, students write letters to their drivers. Students’ skills in reading, writing, geography, mathematics, social studies and history are enhanced.
In addition to sending postcards, Alf and Dillon also e-mail their class at Arongen Elementary School at least two times a week. To spice things up for the students, they also send postcards and e-mails from their dog, Buddy.
“They will describe something from a dog’s point of view and we will have to guess what is going on,” Donohue explained. “They send us trivia questions along with the roads they take so we can follow the route.”
After two years with the program and teacher Donohue, they got to visit with their class for the first time this past June. “We want to thank our company, Yanke, for arranging the visit,” Dillon related. “It was a logistical feat to get us there, but they made it happen.”
The couple joined Trucker Buddy because they “don’t have any little people in our lives,” Alf said. Now, they are hooked, she added. “We went through postcard withdrawal at the beginning of the summer, so I started sending postcards to a friend’s child.”
They plan to continue with the Trucker Buddy program, again matched with Donohue, and look forward to starting with a new second-grade class.
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