‘Tis the season to be giving and getting, which makes it a perfect time to share a yearbook staff “Wish List” with parents and school officials. Any yearbook staff would be happy to find these under its holiday tree.
yearbook staff
You can get your staff to cheer about yearbook. Trevor Johnson, the yearbook adviser at Sherando High School in Stephens City, Va., gets his staff to cheer and play games, all in the interest of motivating students to a new level of dedication to the yearbook.
Yearbook staff members need to feel as important to the production of the publication as the editor is. I did this by empowerment, which enabled my small staff to produce the 2006 Spartonian yearbook for Hempfield Area High School in Greensburg, Pa.
It is registration time and we’ve put up posters saying, “Yearbook wants you.” We’ve run announcements advertising the yearbook class and distributed applications to interested students. Registration finishes and my principal calls me up to pick up the preliminary list. In addition to those students that my staff and I worked hard to recruit are students I don’t know.
A staff manual should answer any question a yearbook staff member may have if they were to find themselves working alone in the yearbook room – not that that should happen. But the point is, the manual needs to be inclusive and easy to navigate and access information. Place your mission statement and purpose at the beginning with the table of contents and, at minimum, put these items in the manual. This contents list comes from Deborah Garner, yearbook adviser at Central High School in Springfi eld, Mo.
They can’t always spell.
They can’t always read.
They can’t always write.
However, I have found Individualized Education Plan (IEP) students deserve a spot on my yearbook staff as much as the straight-A-in-every-English-class students.
If you want something done right, do it yourself, right? Too bad the world of yearbooks doesn’t work that way. However, an effective use of your editorial staff can help you to be well on your way to a great publication – done right.
Help can come from unlikely sources. After Hurricane Katrina struck
the Gulf Coast Aug. 29, small, rural Hammon High School in Hammon, Okla., was able to donate two computers and a 35mm camera to Grace King High School in Metairie, La., which usually has about 1,500 students.
Recruiting a top-notch yearbook staff is important to the success of a yearbook program – just ask advisers who have no control over the process.
There are many ways to tell a story, but to entice readers to linger over the yearbook copy, the best writers follow basic story-telling rules. Most of those rules revolve around the stories of the people in the school. The events may not change year to year, but the people do, and how they participate in and react to those events makes each year unique. Consider these basic points ofcopy writing to tell the story of those people.
