Local residents will have a sweet way to kick off their weekends, as Volinia Outcomes School hosts its annual Maplefest Saturday morning.

Children and adults are invited to enjoy a pancake breakfast, tour the school’s sugar shack and participate in several other activities from 7 a.m. to noon at the facility, located outside Russ Forest at 54080 Gards Prairie, Decatur. Admission costs $6 for adults and $3 for children 10 and younger.

The menu for breakfast will include pancakes, sausage and cornbread, which will be served with fresh maple syrup.

in additino to the meal, visitors may watch demonstrations on how maple syrup is created inside the school’s sugar shack. They may also receive horse-drawn wagon rides around Russ Forest beginning at 9 a.m. and purchase a sundry of products produced from the forest’s maple trees, including butter, candy, coffee, popcorn and cotton candy, said Amy Anderson, the principal of Volinia Outcomes School.

“The students will be in charge of almost everything,” Anderson said. “They will be serving breakfast, hosting the tours, helping with the wagon rides, selling products and helping with parking.”

The Lions Club will also offer free vision screenings for children, and members of the Cass County Sheriff’s Office will help parents create ID kits for their children.

Students will also sell birdhouses and birdfeeders that they built using old tree tapping materials the school once used for instruction, Anderson said.

“We no longer use the large spiles we have onsite because they end up killing the trees,” Anderson said. “We are reengineering them into something else that is kind of cool.”

Volinia Outcomes School — an alternative education school with the Marcellus school district — has hosted the annual event for more than 20 years, Anderson said. The breakfast serves one of the main fundraisers for the school, which will use the funds to pay for student activities and programming, as well as for repairs to the syrup evaporator in the facility’s sugar shack (officials are borrowing working equipment for Saturday’s demonstration).

The school has nearly 30 currently enrolled in classes, from Cassopolis, Decatur, Dowagiac, Edwardsburg, Marcellus, Niles and Three Rivers, Anderson said. Students choose to attend Volinia for a variety of reasons, including smaller class sizes and greater flexibility compared to the traditional middle or high school setting, Anderson said.

On top of classroom and online instruction, students participate in several career days every year.

Earlier in the school year, the students got a chance to learn more about emergency services when crews with Medflight and local fire and police departments visited the school. The school will host a hand-on career day next week, where the students will get to learn more about trades such as cosmetology, cooking or working with electrical lines, Anderson said.

With events aimed at pleasing the entire family, Anderson hopes to draw a large crowd Saturday.

“If you don’t know how maple syrup is made, this is a cool way to learn,” Anderson said. “You will be supporting some local students in process.”