This is the third year Manor College and Wyncote Academy have partnered to collect maple sap for maple syrup. 

Manor College and Wyncote Academy have successfully collaborated for a third year to tap local maple trees and evaporate sap into syrup. 

One of several goals of the urban agriculture program at Wyncote Academy is to enrich the health, prosperity and learning opportunities of students, through hands-on learning. The partnership with Manor College is among the ways Wyncote is doing that. 

“This is another aspect of what students learn at Manor College beyond the textbooks,” Michael Landis, Director of Liberal Arts at Manor College, said. “These are real life skills. The drill is just the beginning. All of a sudden, the student feels confident and feels ‘Hey, maybe I have a way of taking my own creative energy and transferring it over to something they feel happy about.” 

Tapping the Maple Trees

During winter 2022, Wyncote Academy first partnered with Jethro Heiko to tap local maple trees and evaporate syrup. 

The school erected a “sugar shack” on the “Ashbourne tract” at 7827 Old York Road, Elkins Park to house a state-of-the-art evaporator, provided by a US Dept. of Agriculture grant through Stockton University. Students worked as interns and learned about the “science of syrup.” 

An environmental education elective ran at Wyncote Academy to introduce students to locally foraged foods, preparing for the work-study dimension of the maple sugaring program, and reconnecting them with nature in their own neighborhood. 

The hands-on portion of the program has been continued by science teacher emeritus, Howard Schatz and historical reenactor and retired chemist, Wayne Skilton, with support from volunteer Brianna Bernard.

With help from Landis and others,  Manor College tapped over 40 trees on their campus and the campus of the Sisters of Saint Basil the Great in Jenkintown. Wyncote identified and tapped a sugarbush of a dozen more maple trees within a mile and a half of their institution on the campus of Gratz College. 

In the three years Manor College worked with Wyncote, more than three dozen students have participated in the activity. The annual event saw success at Manor College in unique ways.

“This is the first time ever using a power drill,” said William Anderson, a Manor College student in 2023. “It was a great experience. I tried something new and I loved it already.”

After the finished product is completed, Manor College uses the syrup and hosts a pancake lunch on campus. 

Since the maple program started, dozens of students, volunteers, and neighbors have been engaged through tapping their own trees, attending boils, and volunteering. Thousands more saw media coverage on ABC, PHL17, Fox 29, in Philadelphia Magazine, Philadelphia Weekly, Chestnut Hill Local and other publications.

The process of engaging students and volunteers in making food from a local resource is the emphasis. 

Wyncote Academy’s Maple Sugaring Program 

However, the weather has been favorable in 2025 with nights below freezing and days above so the product has also been successful in 2025. About 40 gallons of sap must be evaporated to produce one gallon of syrup with a sugar concentration of 67 percent. 

This year’s program harvested nearly 200 gallons of sap to produce over four gallons of syrup which will be jarred in the commercial kitchen of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, another community cooperator as well as a founding hub on the abolitionist Underground Railroad.

Maple syrup offers not only food value, but embodies the rich historical history of the region. Suffragette and abolitionist Lucretia Mott (for whom the neighborhood LaMott is named) advocated for “free produce” (food not produced by slave labor.) 

Students also learn that maple syrup played a surprisingly important role in ending slavery. People think of Vermont and Canada as being the sources of maple production. However, the indigenous Lenape in Pennsylvania also used “sap-sicles” (whose sugar had been concentrated by freezing) as a form of currency. 

One purpose of maple sugaring is to move maple production away from the industrial paradigm and return to collaboration that builds community and strengthens bonds.

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