Senior superlatives are an iconic and traditional part of any high school yearbook.
There are the standard categories: Most likely to succeed, class clown. But this year, yearbook staff at South High School in Anchorage added a few of their own.
There’s mostly likely to find a cure for COVID-19, and most likely to forget to turn their Zoom mic off.
There are a lot of similar nods to the pandemic throughout the yearbook. Because so much of the school year happened online, the high school yearbook staff had the tough job of figuring out how to capture a unique year which kept everyone apart.
There wasn’t even the usual in-person picture day, said South High’s yearbook advisor, Regina Dietrich. So, unless students submitted their own photo, they don’t have a portrait in the yearbook. In some ways, that symbolizes the school year for Dietrich.
“The student just has a blank portrait with their name underneath. Because to us, it kind of represented the Zoom call, where half of your students might not have their cameras on during the class,” said Dietrich.
Even in normal times, putting together a yearbook takes a lot of work. Student photographers show up to all the school events, games, and parties, wandering the halls, catching candid shots of friends in the courtyard.
But they couldn’t do that for most of the 2020-2021 school year. Anchorage high school students didn’t return to in-person learning until March. By that point, yearbooks are usually off to the printer already.
Instead, yearbook staff relied on capturing how high schoolers interacted with each other outside the classroom, said Madeline Tralwick, a senior on the yearbook staff.
“A lot of these pages are oriented around summer jobs, or what kids do outside with their pets or activities, like dancing or sports, outside of school,” she said.
Tralwick and the rest of the staff ended up filling just over 300 yearbook pages. They had a lot of senior ads, and wrote articles including a feature on students geocaching with their families.
They even started an Instagram account, asking students to send in photos and what sections they wanted to see in the yearbook.
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Despite such an unusual year, Dietrich said demand was incredibly high: The yearbooks sold out, just like last year.
“We actually had people who had not pre-ordered books standing in the pickup lane, as people were driving through saying, ‘I messed up, I forgot to order my book, will you sell me yours,’” said Dietrich. “People were standing there making money off of the book that they had pre-ordered by selling them to desperate parents.”
This year, Dietrich ordered hundreds of extra yearbooks to meet demand.
Yearbook companies have noticed that uptick in interest, too.
Kristin Mateski is the vice president of marketing communications for Walsworth, a company which prints yearbooks and provides other memorabilia to schools across the country. She saw a noticeable increase in yearbook sales last year, and expects to see the same this year.
“We suddenly had more parents clamoring to buy a yearbook and saying, ‘You know, my kid missed out on so much this year, this may be the one normal piece of a not normal year,’” she said.
Mateski gets it. It’s been a historic year.
“We saw the yearbooks from 1918, when the flu pandemic hit. As we were talking with advisors, they were saying, and we were agreeing, that this is going to be another one of those yearbooks that is unlike any other,” Mateski said. “Fifty, 100 years from now, people will be looking back and going, ‘Wow, look at what all happened during that time.’”
That historic value is what encouraged Anchorage’s Bartlett High School history teacher and yearbook advisor Kaytlyn Kimball to push the creation of a yearbook this year.
“It was really important to me for the kids to see that it sucks right now, but you’re gonna want to remember this, like your story is still happening,” she said. “It’s still worth being told, still worth putting in a book and flipping back on later.”
Still, it was a hard project, with so many activities canceled, and uncertainty leading to a yearbook staff of two students instead of the usual 10.
At one point, the students, and Kimball herself, weren’t sure there would even be a yearbook this year. But Kimball used online classes to her advantage to find photos.
“I’d Zoom-bomb classes and be like, ‘Hey, I’m Miss Kimball, please send me your picture. Please!’”
And Bartlett senior Liana Tali said they also used social media to ask their peers for photos.
“It was just hard getting pictures in, since nobody wanted to send them, or they were just embarrassed of what they look like, when we know they take pictures all the time,” she said. “So that was pretty tough.”
But Bartlett’s yearbook came together in the end. Its nearly 200 pages feature screenshots of Zoom classes and student artwork. There are selfies of students with friends and families, and a diversity-themed page with photos of students dressed up in traditional regalia.
Even though it was hard, that communal effort is part of what made this particular yearbook so special, Kimball said.
“We couldn’t have done it without them,” Kimball said. “It was definitely a group effort (and) that makes it a unique piece.”
At South High, Tralwick said while her senior year felt “corrupted” at times, she hopes the yearbook serves as a reminder of the good things that happened during the school year, not just the bad.
“We were still able to stay in touch with each other and have a good time, especially spirit-wise and with sports,” Tralwick said. “We really did come together as a school and as students in general to create a year that was memorable.”
