Jim Jordan's 40 Things To Do After The Yearbook Is Done

FIRST DECISION 8. ARE YOU MAKING A SUPPLEMENT?

Are you covering the rest of the year? This is the most significant decision of the spring, which will need to have been made before the year began: if and how you are going to cover the last weeks of the school year. One option would be to produce a supplement that comes out with the book and covers spring sports and other activities, but will most likely not include prom and graduation. This is a great option, as you can have it printed by Walsworth. Before distribution, you will be able to insert it into the back of the book. Another option is to produce a supplement that includes graduation and prom, but it will need to be passed out in the summer or when school begins in the fall, or be mailed to the students. You can put next year’s editors in charge of this project, and it is a great way to give them a chance to design and produce pages. You also may choose to do “wrap around” coverage, which will cover the last nine weeks of the school year but will be included at the beginning of the following year’s book. With this option, the staff keeps chugging right along with just a short break between the coverage of the end of one year and the beginning of another. Early on in my career as an adviser, we always created a supplement that we finished in the summer, and it included prom and graduation. Over the years, we found fewer and fewer students were actually picking them up, so we questioned the importance of putting in all the time and effort. The last supplement we did was for our 50th Anniversary, “It’s About Time,” volume, which utilized week-by-week chronological coverage — so it only made sense to extend our coverage as closely as possible to the end of the year.

Photo by Cassie Bess

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