There’s a certain feeling that settles over Orchard when syrup season begins.

You can smell the bonfire before you see the sugar shack. Buckets appear in the woods. Thermometers, measuring tapes, and notebooks make their way into classrooms and coat pockets. First graders hurry down the trails, checking sap levels and listening for the unmistakable sound of drops hitting the bottom of metal buckets.

Orchard students have been doing this work for nearly 100 years.

Through archival work completed over the past year, Orchard discovered that students have been tapping maple trees as an institution for a full century. One of the earliest photographs uncovered shows buckets hanging from trees in 1926 at Orchard’s original campus on 5050 North Meridian Street.

Last year, Orchard set out to preserve that story in a new way.

Director of Marketing & Communications James Layne and Outdoor Education Coordinator Vicky Prusinski spent syrup season documenting the entire process for a special film celebrating 100 years of syruping at Orchard. The video follows students through every stage of the work: monitoring temperatures, identifying maple trees, measuring tree circumference, drilling with a brace and bit, collecting sap, and boiling it down into syrup.

But more than anything, the film captures what experiential learning at Orchard truly looks like, as students apply science, math, observation, teamwork, and outdoor education in a process they proudly carry out together from start to finish.

You see it in muddy boots running through the woods, students comparing sap levels in buckets, and the pride that comes from doing meaningful work together. You hear it when students explain that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup, or when they talk about their favorite sound of the season: sap dripping into buckets in the sugar bush.

The project also honored the educators who helped champion this work across generations, including Diana Shellhaas, Vicky Prusinski, and beloved Orchard teacher Fred Lorenz, whose commitment to outdoor education helped shape this tradition into such an important part of the Orchard experience.

After the film was completed, participating students and their families returned to campus for a special premiere in the Orchard Theater. Students walked a red carpet, answered questions on stage, and celebrated together over dinner afterward. It felt less like a presentation and more like a community gathering centered around a tradition that has connected Orchard students for generations.

And in true Orchard fashion, the learning extends far beyond the classroom. Using science, math, teamwork, and plenty of patience, students collect and boil enough sap each year to help produce the syrup served at the Alumni Heritage Association Pancake Breakfast, where nearly a thousand members of the Orchard community gather annually to celebrate one of the school’s sweetest traditions.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, sap continues to drip into buckets just like it always has.