0
0
by Carson Hadley
Students and staff at NS won’t be receiving their yearbooks until a couple weeks after graduation this year.
In a normal school year, yearbooks would be distributed on the final full day of school during Hawkstock. However, this year, the yearbooks aren’t scheduled to be delivered to the school until June 9, and they will be distributed at a school sponsored barbecue on June 16. Instead, autograph pages, that can be inserted later into the yearbook, will be distributed at Hawkstock.
Layne Cook, the yearbook advisor, says that prom being pushed back forced himself, the administration and the yearbook staff to make a difficult decision.
“This year, because [prom was in] the middle of April,” Cook said, “we talked to the students in yearbook and with the principal, and we decided, ‘Hey, we haven’t had many pictures to begin with, we’re going to miss prom if we submit and have it on time, and there’s other spring activities and assemblies that are starting to open up, and if we can give ourselves three more weeks, we can have prom in there and a bunch more pictures.’”
The three week submission delay allowed for not only prom, but also several other spring sports and activities to be included in the yearbook. This is important because, due to COVID-19, many other events that normally take place during the school year couldn’t happen this year, leaving the yearbook fairly empty.
“If you look at the first three quarters of school, we didn’t actually have any real activities,” Cook said. “I mean you had some limited attendance at games…so we didn’t have very many opportunities to get pictures of people. We had almost no assemblies for the first three quarters. We had [a few] classroom pictures that we could take, but there was hardly anything. One of the biggest frustrations that we had was, we have this yearbook, but we don’t have anything to remember in it, so the quality of the yearbook was pretty low at that point.”
However, even knowing that getting their yearbook on time would mean not having prom included in it, some students and staff at NS are still frustrated by the delay.
“Prom is important to the community, but it’s also important to have the yearbook,” said senior Liz Madsen.
Madsen also expressed concern about how, for the second year in a row, students will be unable to sign each other’s yearbooks. While Cook understands these concerns, he believes that it will be worth it in the end.
“We’re aware of the frustration,” Cook said. “The thing that people that are frustrated didn’t understand is that, the frustration of not having their yearbook and wanting it sooner would have ended up not having pictures, not having prom, not having some of these important events.”
Ellee Pollock, a student in the yearbook class, says that for her, the extra wait-time to receive her yearbook is worth it if it means including prom.
“I just think that the yearbook is like a flipbook of our year, and prom is a big part of that,” Pollock said. “We all fought so hard to have prom, so I think it’s important that we put that in there.”
