Maanya Parikh, Lillith Dunn, James Garcia
eSomethin Staff
Every school year, students put forth hundreds of hours for a mere 150 pages, and this year is no different. On September 27, 2024, Yearbook opened up for pre-orders once again. The majority of students will purchase one between now and the end of the year. What a lot of people don’t realize is just how much effort goes into each book.
Students choose Yearbook as an elective class. Sophomore Luella Eynon said she chose Yearbook because “I wanted to … see what it was like since I enjoyed it [in seventh grade].”
What many may find surprising is that Yearbook is a full elective class. Students who choose Yearbook have most of the responsibility for planning and creating the yearbook as we know it. However, some of Yearbook’s most important events go on before the year even starts.
According to Joy Wagener, the Yearbook advisor, “the whole book is planned before the first day of school.”
The theme for the yearbook each year is chosen by the previous year’s staff. Then, over the summer, yearbook members meet up and decide on everything from the outline to the page order.
Each year, the staff aim for a theme different from years before. The past few yearbooks featured bright, contrasting colors, so last year’s staff wanted more muted, monochrome colors. This is how they landed on ‘newspaper’ for this year’s theme.
Once they decide on a theme, the next step is creating visuals and choosing the page order of the book. The students will decide what pages they want to work on by running a draft of sorts. They take turns picking what classes and extracurriculars they want to cover.
If someone is really interested in a club, they can cover it. “I’m in Jackets and Dragons… so I really wanted to cover that [in Yearbook],” said Carter Sheeks, one of the seniors taking Yearbook for the first time.
However, sometimes members are assigned something they are not already involved in. Lyla Fischer, another senior, said that she was assigned to heritage clubs, though she doesn’t have much to do with them.
Junior Leena Azizi points out that covering new activities can lead you to new things you never would have discovered before.
After spending quarter one learning the basics of writing and photography, students have to accomplish a number of tasks to complete their pages.
Between finding interviews, attending games and meetings, creating surveys, and formatting pages, yearbook staff are busy all year round. Their goal is to get three photos of every single member of the school into the yearbook. Then, they need to caption all of them. Each staff member is expected to conduct 10 interviews, and create one to two pages per quarter.
Getting those interviews isn’t always easy. Sometimes the people they email don’t get back to them for weeks at a time. “We send them questions, and they ghost us,” Sheeks remarked. Fischer added, “It happens really often”
After all their hard work, yearbook staff must meet a deadline with their publisher, Jostens. Then the yearbook is complete, and all that’s left is to sell it.
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