TOWAMENCIN – Even though yearbooks are received in June, students of The Accolade are hard at work putting them together throughout the entire school year. Between designing and editing spreads, taking pictures, writing captions, and meeting deadlines, The Accolade staff spends countless hours making the yearbook perfect for students.

For those who have never opened a North Penn yearbook, it consists of the standard student and faculty section, clubs and activities section, sports section, and a redesigned student life section.

Students of The Accolade meet everyday as a class to work on their spreads, which can range from a quick student life feature to a detailed spread of an event. Some spreads can be done within a few days, but others require large amounts of time to create.

“For the club and activity spreads there are so many on one spread that it takes longer to get all the information. But if it’s a student life spread it’s just one focus so it’s a little easier to do,” explained this year’s editor-in-chief, Tanya Kler. “If you have all of the pictures and the event already happened you can finish it a few days if you work pretty diligently. But for some things where you have to continuously get new information it takes a little longer.”

To keep things running smoothly, each student is expected to submit their spreads at a certain deadline, which are then edited for the final product.

“Student life was due in December. Our next deadline is all the sophomores, juniors, seniors, any missing student life, and then fall sports and spring sports, so from now on we have a deadline every month until all of the pages are submitted,” said Kler.

After the spreads are submitted, Kler works on looking over and editing spreads and photos, as well as adding captions and tagging students who are in photos.

“We’re all assigned different spreads, so I have to look over them and edit them,” explained Kler. “We have to tag all of our pictures, which means we have to find a name and put it in the picture with whoever is in the picture. Some of the names are really hard to find because you can’t possibly know everyone in the school, so we have to do a lot of digging to find out who they are.”

During the fall, the group attended the 79th annual Columbia Scholastic Press Association journalism conference, where they were exposed to new ideas from other schools across the country. This influx of new ideas inspired them to redesign the yearbook student life section.

“We went to the journalism conference at Columbia [University] and we saw the different yearbooks that some of the schools across the country were putting together and they were really good. They were very different from ours, but we liked them better, so we redesigned the yearbook’s student section,” stated Kler.

Currently, the student life section contains photos from North Penn’s biggest events like Winter Ball, Homecoming, the pep rally, and the cancer football game —just to name a few— but now contains interesting facts and information about students as well.  

“We make sure we’re representing the whole school and not just constantly putting pictures of football games. We really want to make sure everybody is represented,” explained Kler.

By March, each spread is edited and finalized so the yearbook can be sent off to the publisher. The yearbooks are published and sent back in June, where they are then distributed to students. In the meantime, students work on other journalism projects as well as improving their skills in writing stories, captions, and working on design elements.

For students who have any photos of events at North Penn that they would like to see in the yearbook, they can be emailed to [email protected]. Students can purchase yearbooks here, and the deadlines to order is March 1st.