Veteran advisers understand the importance of summer workshops to their yearbook program. New advisers or reluctant staff members may not fully comprehend the benefits of getting a jump-start on the next yearbook.
You may be overlooking a vast and multi-talented resource for your yearbook program: parents. Parents love their children, want them to succeed and want to help when they can. If you show them the value of your program, and explain how it works in a way they can support it, your program will benefit.
New yearbook advisers routinely face obstacles, but when the little pink phone message sheet appeared in my mail tray in mid-November, it aroused no suspicion. The message seemed harmless: “Call the yearbook plant.” Yet, the news I learned when I made that call was straight out of the yearbook X-files.
Putting together a yearbook is no easy task, especially in high school. Staffers have to plan the entire book, coming up with a theme and making overall coverage decisions. Then there are the school events – lots of them – each requiring coverage by a writer and photographer. Once the events are covered, the editing-rewriting-editing process begins. Cutlines, headlines, tool lines follow, along with the spread design. All of this, in addition to homework, sports and everything else high school brings.
During my first few years as yearbook adviser, I wanted to have control over everything. I did not want the students to have too much responsibility for fear of mistakes and errors in the yearbook. As a result, the yearbook process became cumbersome and overwhelming. It took up a large part of each school day and, frankly, the better part of my life.
For Susan Caperna, yearbook adviser at Ridgeville Christian High School, Springboro, Ohio, having 23 students sign up to be on staff was unprecedented.
The last deadline has been met and the staff and adviser breathe a big sigh of relief. Some members of the yearbook staff may think the yearbook lab class just became an extra study hall and now there will be time to catch up on other classes. But, there are almost two months of the school year left.