Year-At-A-Glance: How To Organize The Year
My first weeks
This is a look at the first weeks of my yearbook program. If you read my post on The First 10 Lessons Every Adviser Should Teach, you know that I hold a "bookcamp" before production starts. This intense 3-4 week period comes with homework, nightly study assignments and a final certification test. But how do you organize the entire year? What dates should certain pages be completed by? Most advisers feel overwhelmed when thinking about how to organize the huge project into the 180 days (or much less if you have a spring delivery). Hopefully sharing my structure helps.
For reference, my book is 192 pages for a student population of 1,300 students and due by May for a fall delivery. My ladder typically include:
18 student life spread topics
11 academic spreads
5 club spreads
22 athletic spreads
2 senior athlete spreads
2 senior/grad events spreads
1 senior superlative spread
We also have:
margin space in protrait and reference sections for coverage
reference pages of sports team, clubs, and portriats
index
colophon
dividers
opening and closing
Pre-Production
Following certification, our staff spends as many days as it takes to lock down a strong theme. You see below that I budget about 4-5 days for this process. Sometimes it takes less, sometimes more.
Spread Cycle #1: Fall Sports
Directly after our theme and style is selected, we jump straight into fall sports. I find that even though the season is still in process, and fall student life spreads might be a more timely option, students tend to neglect their attention of fall sports if they jump into these student life spreads. Assigning fall sports now gets students to the games, taking pictures, and recording important moments as they work on the spread. They quickly realize they need to do this to create the spread and they have time to do so. Once the season is over, we can't go back and get photos or observe athletes. (This is what tended to happen if I saved fall sports for our second spread cycle.) We ended up having to collect photos from parents and look at the season on paper because certain sports were not attended. I'll never forget having ZERO girls tennis or golf photos and trying to help the teams that were assigned to monitor the sport but failed to do so well. Now, we just go back and alter captions after our second spread cycle in November once the seasons are over to adjust for teams that had post-season playoff runs and conference honors.
This one of the largest cycles and includes over 8 spreads, one for each sport and marching band. Teams can be stretched thin on small staffs or doing two. I give a full 4 weeks for the first cycle as a result since there is a learning curve. You can see in the gray box the exact spreads I assign.
Flex Week
I end the cyle with a flex week since there may be large amounts of edits coming off the first spreads. If there isn't, we may add an individual story asssignment that we use to build spreads. These might include:
find two students with a unique hobby and interview them, collecting photos of their work
find three new trending words students are using and ask them to define them and get a headshot
interview four students on their fall Starbucks drink order
find four signs on Friday night in the cheering section and interview students on the process of making them
photograph student tailgating and spirit wear; collect min. of five photographs that cover at least 10 students
Spread teams assigned to a related spread can use the library of content collected on these assignments to build a spread and get wider coverage on the topic
Spread Cycle #2: Student Life/Fall Spreads
I title this cycle fall spreads because most of the spreads have to do with fall events. Big ones for us are Homecoming, Spirit Week, Back-to-School Pep Rally, and the Student Cheer Section. We try not to repeat topics every 3-4 years with the exception of these. Bring in topics that fit your theme but also help you cover non-athletes and students not yet in the book. Feature profiles, food and drink, digital and technology, cars and driving, and other cultural topics are ideal since they can be covered quickly and have already formed standards/trends. I tend to wait on fashion and trend pages until the winter when we have more time to see what emerges. We do try to keep track of these trends during the fall.
Senior superlatives are also a good idea to start planning for since some seniors will graduate early.
Cycle #3: Midterms Spreads
I assign academic spreads near Thanksgiving after we have spent many hours photographing the school and classrooms. Students would have each completed 3-4 photo duties around the school and a hearty library is usually built by this point. Students pull student pictures that relate to their topic and try to find students who are not in the book. Really stress to students that this is one section where ALL students can be covered, unlike sports. We try to capture those quiet, studios, introverted students at this time. Students spend additional time visiting key classrooms and interviewing students about the photographs they have selected or taken themselves so that their caption stories name the course, the project/activity captured, learning goals, and student experience via direct quotes.
Below, you will see midterms spread are due at midterms before break. We do not have a standard midterm. Instead, I offer a powerful recruiting and reward tool: The Holiday Hullabaloo. This epic party is famous across my schoo and many say they join to experience it. I use some of our club money to purchase high value prizes like gift cards, drone, camera, beatuy products, and other desireable prizes. Students place tickets they have earned during the semester and during the holiday games we play during the period in the dish of the gift they want. Everyone walks out of the room with a gift and grab bag prizes like slime, bags, novelty pens, and other fun prizes.
Post-Break Work & Meeting
After the start of the year we do a deep look at the coverage report and I hold a 50% Done Staff Meeting update in which we look at excess coverage numbers, low coverage and zero students. This involves some math and dividing pages left with number of low coverage students remaining. If it takes more than 30 students per spread, we are in trouble. From these results we determine how many students we need to cover, if we need to replace any students on spreads, and set goals for coverage in "mod assignments" we create the first week. These mod could be stories we use in the portrait section margins, on Jan. Spreads, or replacement mods for spreads already done that need new coverage. We also spend time tagging missing students in photos on spreads. I often find 10% of students are covered, but were not known/tagged at the time the spread was due. This flex week helps up catch up so we have obtainable coverage goals for the remaining pages. Worse case senario, and yes I have done this some years, is to call the sales rep and ask him to add more pages on to our book. Varisty charges us about $350 for two spreads/four pages.
Spread Cycle #4: January Spreads
We get to work on club spreads after our first week back. This is a good time to complete these spreads because most clubs have held many events and have pictures to share. Our club section is only five spreads in our yearbook and they don't take long to complete. They fit perfectly into the time we have while we wait for winter sports to get deeper into their seasons. We tend to combine clubs into categores and combine coverage. These include:
Service clubs: Student Co., Key Club, and other volunteer-based clubs that serve the students and community
Interest Clubs: Ski club, film club, art honors society, and other clubs that are focused on a passion/interest
Academic clubs: Mock Trial, first responders, In the Know, Model UN and clubs that compete or are centered around building knowledge and experience for future fields
Drama: Drama clubs gets a spread devoted to their fall and spring productions
FFA: Our school is top in the nation for FFA and has a huge programs of hundreds of students, all winning at state levels. We have to spend an entire spread on this club becuase of the coverage it can give us and for its historical importance each year. This may look different for you and could be clubs that are focused on athletic or recreational activities
Cycle #5: Winter Sports Spread
Winter Sports are few in number at our school so we combine these spreads with a few TBA topics we determine at this time. These can be spreads we added after our staff meeting or student life topics for winter, like winter homecoming and snow life, snow days, or other winter topics
March Modness Week
This is unique time for our yearbook because we have finished most of our spreads at this time. No matter what we do, we always seem to have some 200 students or more that are still low coverage. We spend these weeks building mods for the portrait section margins. These are forced coverage topics that students must collect responses and headshots for; they can be asked to any student and may or may not relate to their high school experience. We try to make these a last resort for most students and focus on non-buyers in these areas. Typically they have to get 10 students in each low coverage mod assignments for a total of 20-30 covered . This depends on staff size and number of students needed. These mod topics might include:
"last thing they Googled"
"one thing I learned this year"
"two truths and a lie"
"go to am snack"
"alarm times"
These margins in the portraits can cover 10-15 students per page. We can pack in the coverage and honestly, without these, we would never get every student in the book at least once. These are an example of what they look like....
Post Spring Break Work
Spring Sports start after break and is our final full cycle. We trend to rush these and only cover until their mid season. We can always go back if time permits and add season results, but since most of the seasons run through end of May, we tend to phrase our writing like "at mid-season, the team was 10-2 and primed to make it to Regionals"
This allows us to finish the spreads by the end of April and get to work doing final edits and low coverage work (getting last students in) via a collage spread at the start of the portraits/people section. We check out reference section captions and squeeze in small stories about athletic recognition and colllege signing day.
We also work on our colophon and finalize senior athelte pages.
From here, we are into our final 2-3 weeks and seniors are about to leave. We work on interviewing as many seniors as we can for the upcoming graduation spreads and attend senior events to photograph the action.
Our last week is spent completing final edits and read-through, building the index pages, attending graduation, and completing the graduation spreads (the grad night spead and grad candid spread)
Our last day we tend of celebrate and read any remaining pages that needed last-mintue changes, or fix index errors in which names need changed or page inclusions need checked.
I hope this look at my year helps you format yours. It took me almost three years to develop this formula and it works for my staff, my process, and my school. I hope you will find one that works for you too!
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