Gallery • 10 Photos

Alana Mayes

The yearbook advisor, Meredith Moody, is retiring this year, but she spent her career as a respected and beloved guide for all the students in the class.

On May 20 the front parking lot outside of the B building will be busy with students waiting patiently to receive their 2016-17 Talon Yearbooks hot off the press. The day is expected to run smoothly, but the road getting to distribution day was not as smooth.

The yearbook class, taught by Meredith Moody, has 28 sophomore, junior, and senior students. There are also four editors of the yearbook: seniors Phoebe Lowe, Erin Son, Michelle Reiss, and Skylar Yang. All students design and create at least 10 yearbook pages, and are responsible for photos, meeting deadlines, designing their pages and helping others in the class. Each page is assigned by the editors before the students even enter the classroom. The editors meet with Moody during the summer to discuss the yearbook and make decisions about it, including assigning each individual page out of the 500 in the yearbook.

“I believe that many people think that yearbook is an easy A,” Lowe said. “To get an A in the class you need to be able to actually turn in your work on time, there are crucial deadlines that we have to meet.”

Yearbook encompasses everything that SMCHS has to offer including faculty, staff and student mug shots, student life, dances, clubs, sports and other special events SMCHS holds during the year into one book. The class makes sure each aspect of SMCHS is represented in the yearbook and that it is represented in the best possible way.

“The hardest part is working with everyone’s busy schedules,” Lowe said. “For instance, when you are assigned the choir page, you are trying to find a good time to take a picture of the choir classes that best works for everyone. If your schedule won’t allow you to be there when it is convenient for the choir teacher, that’s when it becomes hard.”

Yearbook students are often spotted taking photos at sporting events, Masses, dances and other school functions, but their finished product of the yearbook was finally completed March 17 of this year. They work tirelessly during the year, from their first deadline in December to the final date, there is not a day that a yearbook student isn’t taking a photo.

“Clubs are the most difficult to cover because if they haven’t been meeting we aren’t going to cover them in the yearbook and it’s hard to do that,” said photography teacher and yearbook advisor Meredith Moody. “We used to have one day where anybody has a club going on would meet outside the G building and take group photos, but we got kids going from photo to photo. So now we do it where if you have a club, you send us your information and set a date for a photo, but we keep tabs on the announcements on who’s meeting.”

Yearbook faces many challenges throughout the year before they go to print in March, but the most difficult are meeting deadlines and figuring out names for students. It is the responsibility of each student who is laying out a page to ensure that everyone’s name is correct and it corresponds with the correct picture.  That can be difficult, especially when identifying the freshmen.

“There will always be a mistake in the yearbook,” Moody said. “But in a yearbook, you don’t want to misprint someone’s name or anything. The senior section is edited 12 or 15 times before we send it to print and we even know now that there’s a couple of misprints, but they aren’t major.”

Seniors have the most space in the yearbook because of all of the senior events like Kairos, Senior Cruise, Senior Favorites, Senior Pilgrimage, etc. However, the people you will see the least in the yearbook are the ones in the yearbook class.

“We have only one rule in yearbook and I have made this my personal rule: if you are in the yearbook class, you will not be in a candid shot,” Moody said. “This is because the yearbook is about the school, not the yearbook kids.”

The hard work does not go unnoticed by the student body. On May 20, the yearbook will be the talk of the school as everybody flips through it looking for their friends and seeing who the senior favorites are.

“That’s the best part,” Moody said. “Looking at the kids’ faces when they look at the yearbooks for the first time as they arrive on the trucks, it’s a look of excitement of ‘I did this’ and once you have experienced that you will work hard.”

Each year the Talon Yearbook is a creative opportunity to remember the year at SMCHS and the memories  made. It is the representation of everything that makes the school unique.