The Piedmont Highlander

The Student News Site of Piedmont High School

The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Yearbook achieves 99 percent coverage of student body

When each student, or at least 99 percent of students, sat down at lunch to flip through the yearbook, in its index they found at least three page numbers printed next to their name.

This year, the yearbook has 99 percent coverage of the student body, meaning each student is featured at least three times, including their own student portrait. Besides more widespread coverage than ever before, the layout and order of the book have also changed significantly, according to editors-in-chief, juniors Rebecca Glick and Eva Mills.

The 99 percent coverage, a goal called the “universal goal of all yearbooks” by Mills, is much higher than ever before.

“I think we have hit 80 percent before. I am not sure we have ever hit 90 before,” said yearbook adviser and photojournalism teacher Jody Weverka. “We tried, but there was not enough space in the yearbook. There was not a system for it.”

The new space and system for such widespread coverage came mostly through the feature that runs along the bottom of the yearbook, which is called connections, Mills said. Running throughout the entire book, this feature connects students to details about their year, such as both people attended the same event or participated in a similar activity.

“We wanted to cover the person as not just them, but as part of a bigger thing,” Mills said. “We were trying to show that even in high school which can be self-centered, we are all sharing this moment and these experiences.”

Other changes to the yearbook included replacing a feature called the “World Beat” that showed news from the past year and was designed by Josten’s, the yearbook company. Instead, the yearbook class created their own modules and chose their own news to represent the year.DSC_0013

“It is the stories of the year and it is not the same book as 1992 or 2012. We want the yearbook to be dated,” Weverka said. “We want it to tell the stories of this year that are unique.”

Although many aspects of the yearbook were improved and made more specialized, these new tasks also added new challenges.

A large portion of the yearbook staff were new to the class this school year, which meant that there was a large learning curve for assembling the yearbook, Glick said. The sheer amount of pictures that needed to be collected was incredibly large as well, needing around 2,600 photographs to fully cover the approximately 875 PHS and MHS students, Weverka said.

Sports co-editor sophomore Charlotte Altieri recounted stopping many students randomly during classes or in hallways during breaks to complete the connections bar on the bottom of the book to achieve high coverage. In the end, this yearbook is different than in years past and has let the staff gather ideas and strategies for the future.

“This year we tried to really change things up. In the past, [the yearbook] has been simple and clean,” Glick said. “We were trying to go for a theme that allows for many ways to incorporate [the theme].”

Donate to The Piedmont Highlander

Your donation will support the student journalists of Piedmont High School. Your contribution will allow us to purchase equipment and cover our annual website hosting costs.

More to Discover
Donate to The Piedmont Highlander