“It took off, and it is to the point that I knew going throughout the semester that this was special, I felt from the moment that I introduced it to them that it could be really great. But the intensity and the depth and impact I could not have predicted. I’m honestly a bit overwhelmed by it,” Ashley Snider said in an interview early Wednesday morning.
Senior 2 Senior, started by Ashley Snider, is a pen pal program connecting seniors in high school to senior citizens. This project started as a way to continue a project she pulled off last semester. That project, “Letters from Santa,” involved her senior students creating a letter-writing program to send to kids on Santa’s nice list. It was so successful that she wanted to replicate it during her spring semester.
The idea came to her from an email service that her mother is enrolled in, where writing prompts are emailed to her and published in a book for the family to keep as a keepsake. It gave Mrs. Snider so much insight into her mother’s life, learning things she never thought to ask about, and she saw how much her mother enjoyed sharing these memories. She wanted to replicate that special moment, and since Davie County has such an active senior citizen community, she decided to keep it local.
Partnering with Davie County Senior Center, each of her 48 students was paired with a pen pal at the senior center. Due to the number of seniors at the center, some had multiple students they were paired with. She guided her students through the first letter, giving them questions to ask their pen pals and encouraging them to be vulnerable when writing them. As she was reading the senior citizens’ responses it became clear to her that “they were responding with the same intensity and the same vulnerability and the same emotions that many of my students were putting into it.” After the first letter, the training wheels came off, and she let her students write their letters, giving them suggestions and questions to ask to continue building those relationships.
On Monday, May 13th, Snider’s classes traveled to the Senior Center located in Downtown Mocksville to meet their pen pals. Many students were nervous, unsure of what to expect when meeting the person they had been corresponding with over the last few months. As they began meeting their pen pals, all those worries faded away, and the conversations flowed with such ease. Snider said that after the field trip on Monday, Carrie Miller, who works at the senior center and helped facilitate this project, sent her an email stating “All of the seniors who were there came up to her and said this is the best thing they’ve ever done, and let’s do it again.”
As word began to spread about this project, it caught the attention of multiple news outlets. It started locally at WXII, then spread to the Winston-Salem Journal, and then made national news as Snider and two of her students completed an interview with USA Today on Wednesday, May 15th. Seniors Brianna Covington and Tania Arellano were able to share their experiences during this interview and shared the following quotes.
“I had one pen pal; her name was Allison Brown. I learned we grew up with a lot of the same experiences,” Covington said. ”We were both the oldest siblings and shared a similar childhood. It was so mind-blowing to me that out of the random pairing, I was able to get paired with someone who I could learn so much from. It was a great experience. She had such a kind heart and was very inspirational. She helped me learn a lot, especially about the stereotypes surrounding the different generations and how those aren’t true.”
“Her name is Anne, and she is 62—it was one of the first things she told me. Our connections were based on travel, I recently moved here and it was a brand new semester. All the friends I had made in the previous semester were gone so it was a new start.
We connected on that, she explained that I would be just fine and how she experienced the same situation by moving around a lot during her childhood. Through her support on this, I felt a lot of joy because someone understood me. We connected on certain travel aspects and our views on careers, especially how we want to see technology evolve and how we want to see women behind that.“ Tania Arellano.
USA Today Article: North Carolina high schoolers, seniors inspire with pen pal program
WXII Article: High School seniors become pen pals with senior citizens
