Happy new yearbook

When I entered high school last year, I quickly became quite disillusioned about the yearbook committee.  Yearbook was one of my favourite extracurriculars throughout junior high, and for good reason.  It was a giant part of the school -- pretty much every student bought one.  The yearbook was fun and amazing and made by the students, creative and memorable and representative of our student identity.  After three years of such an amazing system, I wasn't prepared for the underwhelming flatness of our high school yearbook.  Its only theme is red and white -- our school colours, and every page has pretty much a cookie cutter layout.  A few of my friends and I went to the information meeting for the committee last year, and we were essentially told that the yearbook was not a place for creative thought.  If you're on the committee, you take the pictures you're told to take and you stick them in the place you're told to put them.  That's it, that's all.  We decided to not join the committee after that; it was obviously not the thing for us, but those weren't the only quibbles we had with the yearbook.  You see, unlike with our previous experiences, the yearbook covers up until the very end of the year, saturated heavily with end of year activities such as prom and graduation.  This, while fine in itself, has one unfortunate implication:  you don't get to sign yearbooks.  Throughout junior high, this was the source of so much excitement for students.  Flipping through the crisp new yearbooks when they arrive in June, finding the pictures of yourself and your friends, and most importantly, writing messages in the yearbooks of everyone you know.  That's where the appeal of a yearbook lies, through my experience.  Those are the memories: your and your friends' haphazard scrawls, not just the pictures and text on glossy paper (although those are important too).  As I said, in Intermediate the majority of students bought their yearbook.  Here, in high school, where yearbooks should really matter, only about a hundred are sold out of a student population of 1100.  Yes, the yearbook might miss out on pictures of prom and names of award winners, but those people have their own pictures and their own certificates and plaques to remember these events.  But signing yearbooks; those memories are totally unique.  This is a pretty long preamble for something in which very little has happened as of yet.  In any case, this year the previous yearbook coordinator retired, and no teacher has been willing to fill the position.  Jessica and I saw this as our chance.  We emailed the principal our proposal outlining our plan to create a new yearbook committee and begin a whole new epoch in our school's yearbook history.  The book would be made by the students, for the students, fueled by student input and student creativity.  The principal approved our proposal, except for one thing.  For the past forty years the yearbook has been released in the September of the following year, not in June when they can be signed, and to change that we'd have to get proof that this is what the students want; she is trepidatious in believing that swapping prom and awards pages for the ability to sign yearbooks is a fair trade.  We'll have to get the student body to vote, but I sincerely hope that we'll be able to make this work.  Signing yearbooks are so quintessential; I can't imagine graduating from high school without it.  But I'm getting away from the CAS activity at hand.  Long story short, Jess and I are attempting to conquer the organizational commitment so many teachers and staff have shied away from:  running the school yearbook.  With the help of our trusty teacher supervisor Mr. Toms and a committee of students that we have yet to interview, we shall succeed in making the school yearbook a product heralded from every corner of our school, something purchased, treasured, and signed by every student, and with input from the same.  We shall... stay after school tomorrow to take pictures of the field hockey championship, since nobody has taken any pictures of any school sports or activities throughout any of September or October.  Running the yearbook will be a daunting, time-consuming task, but I know we can do it!