“Making it count,” said Mr. Stapleton, the Apex Friendship yearbook adviser, when asked about the theme for this year’s yearbook. In the midst of a school year full of firsts—first fully-virtual semester, first year without fall sports, first virtual first day of class—the student body has attempted to do exactly that as they try to make the best of a crazy year. Yearbook staff has been “making it count” as well, even as they sit behind computer screens, working hard to put together Apex Friendship’s sixth yearbook, produced completely virtually for the very first time.
“Typically a [yearbook] theme is...indicative of the types of stories we tell in the yearbook each year. They also tend to be positive, optimistic, upbeat, which didn’t feel necessarily right this year,” said Mr. Stapleton, when asked about the significance behind the “making it count” theme. He continued, “And so, we kind of settled on making it count as something that’s not necessarily as upbeat as they typically are, but that still is a positive way to put a spin on this year that is trying for everyone.” Considering the yearbook staff continues to work on this year’s book without students to take pictures of or school events to document, the theme seems especially fitting.
But how to put together a yearbook without in-person school? This year’s staff and co-editors Reagan Romans (12), Catie McGuire (12), and Katherine Gallagher (12), with some help from Mr. Stapleton, have managed to implement various techniques for finding pictures, including weekly emails, a submission link for AFHS students to send in photos directly from their phones, and even contacting students directly through Instagram or text. Social media has played a significant role, affirmed Romans, explaining, “It is one of the main ways that we are able to get in contact with and reach out to people. We also are able to post polls, questions, reminders, updates, etc. to get people involved in the book and more importantly, to let people know that we are still making a book this year.”
While social media “is useful to an extent,” said Mr. Stapleton, the weekly emails he sends out to the school’s students have proved to be the most effective at garnering student response. Yearbook members work in groups throughout the week to brainstorm what events should be covered for the week’s spread, and condense these ideas into requests that Stapleton sends out bright and early on Monday morning—to each and every one of the school’s 2800+ students.
Even with the emailing, however, the yearbook team has run into other issues—namely, a lack of school spirit and sense of community—that prove slightly more difficult to resolve. “[It’s] kind of understandable,” Mr. Stapleton said, continuing, “but as a result of that vibe, it’s hard to get people to respond to us...You can only follow up so many times. So then that apathy piece, why would the yearbook be a priority for these people? It’s one thing when we can go to their fourth periods and just yank them out and ask them questions and throw them back in their class, but we really can’t do that now...And you miss that sense of community within the staff itself, that’s really important.”
Yearbook students have come up with some creative ways for remedying this problem. Some have even gone as far as driving to their peers’ houses and taking pictures of them from outside (don’t worry, they asked permission beforehand—no stalkers here). On underclassmen picture day, Mr. Stapleton said, “Yearbook staff members pretty much posted up outside as people were coming in for hours at a time, and as they were getting into line, we would take a photograph of them, and we would ask one of ten different questions of them, to backlog a bunch of interviews, a bunch of portraits.” As for communication between staff members, however, Mr. Stapleton said that while students can set up group chats and group Google Meets, “[The sense of community is] just not the same and never going to be as good.”
Despite this, there has been a lot of good to come out of the production of the yearbook this year. Even with the current group of staff members having less preparation for the yearbook than in previous years, Mr. Stapleton said, “I think that I am currently working with as strong a set of editors as I’ve ever had. They're really rising to the moment...I’ve been able to rely on them exactly how I needed to and I'm very proud of them.”
Co-editor Reagan Romans commented, “I think that the biggest highlight or triumph with the yearbook so far is that we are creating a successful book. Going into this school year, there was so much uncertainty with how things were going to work. We had no idea how making the yearbook was going to work. Despite all of the challenges, we have been able to create a stable process to get all of the things we need, and I am very impressed with the staff and the quality of work we are still able to produce.”
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