SEDRO-WOOLLEY — The classroom at Evergreen Elementary’s Structured Learning Center was a hive of activity as students, with the help of teachers, helped craft a Thanksgiving-style feast.

They made many items from scratch, including noodles, chicken gravy, salads, stuffing and mashed potatoes for an annual classroom feast.

The lunch, called the Celebration of Friends and Family, was started by teacher Alyssa Bowhay more than 10 years ago. The celebration brings in parents, grandparents, siblings and friends to share a simple meal.

The classroom is called the Structured Learning Center for a reason. The students in the program suffer from “low-incidence disabilities,” or conditions like autism that affect less than 1 percent of the population. That means the students require rigid schedules and predictability in their day.

Parents at the celebration said their students, many of whom have varying degrees of autism, are helped tremendously by Evergreen’s program and the staff’s care.

Meriem Towner of Concrete said her son, Anwar, 11, communicates with some sign language but is otherwise nonverbal.

“He comes home happy and looking forward to coming here in the morning,” she said. “They’re wonderful here.”

Every Friday, students go on a field trip, Bowhay said. Preparing for the dinner last week was one of the more recent stops, when students went to an area store to select items to cook.

The money to pay for the students’ outings come from classroom fundraisers, said Peggy Massey, a classroom paraprofessional. One fundraiser includes selling homemade soup and cookie mixes that students combine themselves.

Students have taken trips to the tulip fields, oyster beds, farms, stores and restaurants, Bowhay said. They also go swimming, horseback riding and hiking.

For any other student, these trips might be a treat, but for students in the Structured Learning Center, the trips are a test of manners, civility and patience.

Linda Eidsness, mother of 7-year-old Bode, said she ran into the group once when they were at a trip to Costco.

“I watched him, and he didn’t know I was there,” she said. “I watched his manners and how he waited in line.”

Many parents take such activities for granted. But for autistic students, “normal” social behavior is often exceptional, she said.

Eidsness said Bode loves the program and said the teachers look at how students learn instead of forcing them into a set curriculum.

“They make him feel special, and they make him feel included,” she said.

As for the celebratory lunch, “It’s all he’s talked about for the last two weeks,” Eidsness said. “This is the grand finale of the class. They learn so much.”

Six adults watched over the 12 students as they prepared food Thursday morning.

The students helped craft the dinner in nearly every step of the process, including reading instructions and hand-cranking piles of noodles onto a cutting board.

Bode said he helped make the noodles and the chocolate frosting for the cake.

“Yesterday we made cornbread,” he said. “I love it because it’s crunchy.”

An added challenge for the feast, Bowhay said, is that the food had to be gluten free because some parents feel that gluten exacerbates their child’s condition.

Cooking in a classroom required some ingenuity, too. Several slow cookers were spaced throughout the room to cook various dishes. Despite attempts to minimize surprises, life here is often full of them.

Teachers arrived early that day to start cooking the turkey in a slow cooker. But at some point, the fuse blew. An hour and a half later, teachers realized the turkey would not be done in time for lunch.

The problem was nothing a quick turn in the microwave couldn’t soon fix.

Parents Michel Jevons and Cecil Jevons III arrived shortly before the feast was served. They said their 7-year-old son Christopher, a high-functioning autistic student, loves the program. The Jevons’ said the field trips do more than classroom learning could ever teach him.

“It goes beyond learning,” Cecil Jevons III said. “We’ve seen an enormous improvement.”