Friday mornings are particularly sweet at Elizabethtown Area High School. That's the day the E-town Bakers deliver their homemade muffins to teachers and staff throughout the building.

The E-town Bakers are members of Rebecca Booth's Life Skills class at the high school. For 10 years, Booth has been guiding students in running the business, which not only offers breakfast for its customers, but also provides learning experiences for its employees.

"This is a student-run business, and I'm just the facilitator," Booth said. "The students do everything."

The bakers shop for muffin ingredients on Tuesdays and bake the treats on Thursdays. They prepare their muffins in the food lab and kitchen they share with the Family and Consumer Science classes. "We oversee the students in the kitchen, but they are doing the measuring and the baking," Booth stated, noting that her teaching assistants - Angie Horn and Melisa Musser - supervise as well. The class members take a food safety class with the Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13, and they display their certificates on their delivery carts to indicate they've had the training, Booth noted. Each week, the E-town Bakers prepare blueberry muffins and a rotating feature muffin, which they select from a large recipe book in the classroom. Each customer also receives coffee, tea or juice. "We make about eight dozen muffins a week," Booth commented, noting that the bakers get to eat a muffin of their choice, and leftovers are shared with the building's custodians.

There are currently 10 students in the class, and they deliver to 85 customers each week. The students bill the customers monthly. "On the first Friday of the month, they collect the money and total it up, which is a huge life skill to work on," Booth commented. The bakers are a self-sustaining business, with any extra proceeds used to help fund opportunities for community learning such as trips to the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster.

Booth remarked that the E-town Bakers are learning much more than how to make muffins. "When we grocery shop, we teach mini lessons and talk about unit price and cost comparison," she explained. "We talk about budgeting and how they need to spend within our means. ... Even just knocking on doors, saying hello, greeting and talking to the teachers they deliver to is a life skill. It's really great, because these students spend most of their day with me, and they don't see a lot of other teachers, so this is a nice way for them to say hello, to interact and to meet new people."

The program has been so well received at Elizabethtown, it's prompted other districts to consider similar classes, Booth said, adding that she's seen so many benefits for her students. "Since I typically have these students for four years, it's been great to see how they grow and evolve over those four years," she shared. "Some wouldn't even knock on the doors when they first started, because they were too nervous, but they end up growing in their leadership through this."