For many students at the Nellie Stone Johnson Community School in Minneapolis, winter is not all about happy holidays and warm apple cider. Winter means bone-chilling temperatures that can keep them from going to school if their family can’t afford to buy them a warm coat.

But thanks to a delivery by volunteers at Eagan, Minn., based Freightmasters about 600 of these students will be a little warmer this winter.

Freightmasters staff teamed up with some other warmhearted people at national clothing retailer Charming Shoppes to help get coats to disadvantaged Minneapolis students. The coat distribution was a part of Charming Shoppes’ “Keeping Kids Warm” program, which provides the coats. Last fall, before winter was unleashed, Freightmasters and Charming Shoppes personnel arrived at the school with the coats.

“When we gave those coats to those kids it was, for many of them, the first real winter coat they had ever owned,” says Mark Reimer, corporate vice president of Freightmasters.

Reimer says that more than 20 percent of the children who received coats were either homeless or between homes. He talked with the school’s principal and a social worker, and they told him that because of this coat giveaway school attendance should improve.