Have you ever wondered who put together your school yearbook? Well, this Academic Advocate Reporter did. I found out who organizes the yearbook at my school, Phillip W. Sugg Middle School in Lisbon. Mrs. Karin Dionne, an eighth grade teacher, is in charge of the yearbook committee. I bet your wondering what is a yearbook committee, and what do people do for the committee? What people DO on the PWS yearbook committee is basically put together their schools’ yearbook with the guidance of Mrs. Dionne. You’re probably thinking, that sounds easy, well it’s really not.

The PWS Yearbook Committee meets every Friday at school until about three o’clock. Once Mrs. Dionne has written the schedule for the meeting, she takes attendance and then she starts passes out everything needed for the meeting. At the beginning of the year, yearbook committee members took all of the photos of students and their activities and identified all of them. The committee puts an individual sticker on the back of every picture and indicates where it is going to be positioned on the page in the yearbook. Yearbook committee members have to do this for every single sixth, seventh and eighth grade student. There are about 120 students in each grade. That is a lot of work. The yearbook members design each page, put them in separate envelopes and then send them in to get printed.

I asked Devon Brewer, one of the students in yearbook, what her favorite part of the yearbook was, and she said, “All of it is fun, the way we get to start through everything and decide what goes in our yearbook.” I then asked Jordan Beauparlant, another yearbook member, why she joined yearbook and she said, “Because I wanted to take part in something people will have for the rest of their lives.” I interviewed Mrs. Dionne and asked her about this year’s’ yearbook staff. “I have an excellent staff, and they always come when they can,” shared Mrs. Dionne. I was also wondering what was Mrs. Dionne’s favorite part to do in the yearbook and she replied, “Being able to show kids how to do things and letting them be creative. When the pages come back, I enjoy how the kids say in amazement, “I made that”.”

Most people don’t think much about what the yearbook committee actually has to do. They just expect a yearbook, but if the students didn’t volunteer their time to it, there wouldn’t be any yearbooks at your or your child’s school.