Bloomington high school yearbook staff documents key events

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - On June 3, as several of her classmates and team members assembled for graduation, sophomore Hannah May marched through the halls of Bloomington High School North with her camera raised, waiting to chronicle the perfect moments of the day.

She was looking for anything "that captures the essence of the event," she said: families and friends hugging their graduates, maybe a few tears being shed. Anything that captures that bittersweet "leaving aspect." It's the very last spread she's putting together for North's yearbook, and she wants it to be good.

She takes a few shots as she walks the halls and checks the camera viewfinder, but isn't quite satisfied. The heel of her shoe breaks, but yearbook waits for no woman, and she soldiers through with a little tape to hold the shoe together. Threading her way through the parents and siblings trying to find seats in the gym for the ceremony, she stops by the production booth to talk to her yearbook partner, Paige Osborne. They briefly discuss the kinds of shots May expects to get and their vision for the graduation pages. Osborne asks her if she has picked up the yearbook staff's good camera. In answer, May points the camera at Osborne, shoots, and checks the picture.

"It's the good one," she said.

The yearbook staff

The yearbook staff has been closing in on the 2016-17 book for several weeks. In the second week of May, Sophie Young, one of this year's editors, said the staff had finished about 175 pages of the 250-page book, all fact-checked, copy-edited and sent off to the printer. About half an hour before school started, while some of her fellow staff members toiled at their two-page spreads, Young pulled up a few of the finished pages on one of the class computers to show them off.

An opening page shows a picture of an Oliver Winery hot air balloon floating above a green forest, with an introduction by editor Anna Raphael. The next few spreads lay out students' adventures from the previous summer as well as the local reaction to the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, last June. Organized and designed by season and by beats handled by teams of students, the pages covered school sports, clubs, arts and student life as well as local and national events.

"I loved the election page. I think it went really, really well," Young said, pulling up a spread that featured students' comments leading up to the presidential vote last November. The yearbook staff conducted interviews in the days before the election designed a page focusing on the diversity of viewpoints held by the student body. It also incorporated the results of the school election. May and Osborne contributed to that page, as did classmate Ellen Willibee.

Unlike some high schools, where yearbook is an extracurricular activity, Bloomington North has a whole class devoted to the publication, in the same wheelhouse as its journalism courses. In yearbook, the students write stories, design pages and take their own photographs to chronicle life at North from August to May, in addition to other tasks. "It is way too much work for a club, I think," said Juliana Crespo, who has taught the class for the past two years. More than anything, she said, it's almost like running a small business.

Much of the work is done in class, but the students still meet outside of school hours to make sure the job gets done. This year's book has been in the works since before the 2016-17 year started, when Crespo met with Young and Raphael to talk about theme they wanted to choose. They came away with "Our World, Our Story," wanting to bring more of a global perspective to the document their classmates would hold onto for years.

"We wanted to create a book that explained the year at North but that covered a lot of events that happened outside Bloomington and even outside the country," Raphael said.

Raphael joined the yearbook club her sophomore year as an experiment to see whether her love of writing transferred to an interest in journalism. It didn't take long before she was hooked.

"I really liked the style of writing, and I really thought the human interest side felt different from anything I'd ever done before," she said. In her junior year, she took on a leadership position among about 10 members of the class. This year, she and three classmates led their class of almost 20.

As the end of the year drew closer, the yearbook club began wrapping up more spreads and sending off as many pages as they could. In past years, Raphael said, the end-of-the-year crunch to finish the book has been stressful and at times chaotic, but this year has gone considerably more smoothly. Instead of spending time feeling stressed, she, Young and the other senior editors have been able to reflect on their own "wistfulness" at the end of the school year and their time at North. While May took pictures of the ceremony June 3, the senior members of the yearbook staff graduated.

"I'm really glad I was able to end on the note that we did," Raphael said. "I think it's given me a better appreciation for the school as a whole, being able to cover it."

Standing on the sidelines of graduation, camera around her neck, May said she was feeling pretty calm about the yearbook's progress as it drew closer to completion. She also said she wasn't feeling too sad about the end of the process, since she'll be returning to start next year's book in the fall. She is nervous, though, about losing the leadership of the graduating seniors.

The team was to meet one final time to complete the graduation pages, edit the index pages and fill in the gaps on a few remaining pages. Then they will send the book off for printing. Raphael estimated it would be printed by early August and delivered to the school for the class to distribute at the beginning of the school year. By that time, she'll be packing up for her first year at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she will play violin on a music scholarship while pursuing a sociology or psychology degree.

Picking up her yearbook will give her a chance to visit Crespo and next year's yearbook staff. She said she felt a little sad that she wouldn't be part of next year's team, but that she has been grateful for everything her yearbook has given her.

Speaking of both the book and the experience, she said, "It's something that I definitely will take with me."

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Source: The (Bloomington) Herald Times, http://bit.ly/2s0vf4r

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Information from: The Herald Times, http://www.heraldtimesonline.com