Every year the Pleasant Valley High School yearbook team takes on the ambitious task of capturing the spirit of the entire student body into one book. But in order to do so, one goal must stand above the rest–inclusion. This year, the staff have been working even harder to ensure that as many students as possible feel represented throughout the pages.
“The yearbook has a goal every year to include at least half of the student body in the yearbook at least 3 times,” said Kelsey Vickers, a Co-editor-in-chief for the Spartan Yearbook. “While the goal seems achievable, in past years it’s been hard to reach.” However, Vickers and her co-editors, determined to change that pattern, have introduced new strategies to better connect with students and find ways to include them in the book.
Amongst these efforts is an increased presence on social media, which allows the team to reach a larger student audience easily. By posting on popular platforms like Instagram, it was found that PV students are more willing and able to engage with the yearbook’s work.
Alongside this, yearbook staff have been working to contact unincluded students via school email in hopes of finding a way to add their presence into this years’ book; asking for quotes, inquiring about pictures for yearbook spreads and providing opportunities for students to write letters to their younger selves are just a few of the many ways staff welcomes other students to take part in the yearbook through email.
Yet, even with these methods, reaching every student is still increasingly difficult to manage. “One of the biggest struggles is not finding ways to communicate with everyone. Lots of students do not have social media platforms that we can easily communicate with them on and do not check their email very often,” Vickers explained. Without a quick and reliable way to contact these individuals, adding them to the yearbook becomes complicated.
At the same time, many staff members have had to overcome their own hesitation while creating on their spreads. Vickers admitted, “Lots of our staff are nervous to go outside of their comfort zone and reach out to new members. This has been something we have been working to move past this year.” Still, the team has made a conscious effort to push past those social fears and expand their outreach for the betterment of the books’ final product, and this same sentiment is applied to everybody at PV. “We encourage all students to be good at checking your DM’s and your Pleasant Valley Gmail account,” said Vickers.
Alongside these basic outreach initiatives, on Mar 24, a new opportunity was given to people at PV, which provided a way for students to get their senior photos taken and edited by the yearbook staff and automatically added into the yearbook before photos are due April 5. This was aimed to take the pressures of setting up one’s own photo shoot outside of school off teens and their parents, and allowed for a cheap and easy way to do so right after school hours. The program went incredibly well for its first year, so it is in the process of being planned as a returning occasion next year.
Despite the obstacles, the yearbook team remains committed to its vision. “In a perfect world all students would be included 3 or more times, but it’s extremely hard to include everyone and everything that we want to in such a short book,” Vickers concluded. “It’s important to me that we include as many members of the community as possible, and in an ideal world, we’d have everyone from every background and every group of students included.”
