At the start of spring break, students thought they would return to school after a week off. Within the week long break, COVID-19 started spreading at an alarming rate forcing districts to close schools for a certain amount of time to ensure the safety of students and faculty. These closures resulted in the yearbook staff having to start a new plan to get the book done. With not being able to go inside the school building or see one another, it made the job difficult and stressful. It took many all-nighters, Zoom chats, Slack messages and hard work to make it to the final deadline.
“We originally had in plan to come back to school after spring break and use that week to finish up,” Yearbook Editor in Chief Lauren Graham said. “We weren’t too worried about finishing the book because we had everything we needed at school and we were going to be able work with each other in person. When it was announced that our break would be extended, we knew we had to act fast because our original plan was not going to work and we only had one week left to complete the book.”
With rumors flying around that Keller ISD would be extending the break, the staff started planning on how they would work to meet their deadline. Not being able to work in the school and with each other in person, the staff used Slack, a messaging app, to communicate with one another and Zoom to see each other face to face. Pages that still needed to be finished were pulled from the server, which contains the entire yearbook, the staff’s pictures, and resources. Each page was uploaded to Google Drive and shared. Many staff members had to start a free trial for ‘Adobe Indesign’ which is the program used to create the pages, to get their work done.
“It was rigorous work but worth the hours spent outside the school and free trials,” sophomore Ashley Foster said.
Once is was officially announced that the break would be extended, the staff moved quickly to get everything set up for a long week of work. Staff members finished up pages and worked on last minute jobs. Pages that needed a little love were taken on by multiple members to get them to close to perfect. For the opening and closing of the book, it took the entire week to finalize.
The server played an major part in the stress that involved the unforeseen week ahead for the staff. The server contained almost everything that was needed and could only be accessed on KISD WiFi which lead many members and advisor Kathy Beers parking outside the school and working in their cars to get what they needed.
“The most stressful part was whenever I realized I had to go back to the school and sit out in front of the library to pull photos from the server for hours at a time,” Photo Editor Ainsley Lawhorne said.
Getting close to the end of the week and the deadline, pages needed to be finalized and submitted. To start the process of submitting pages, Beers stayed up hours on end to submit pages to Walsworth, the yearbook’s publishing company. Staff members helped and stayed up sometimes the entire night to make sure pages were fully ready to go.
The week of tremendous work and lack of sleep ended with the final pages being submitted.
“It was an amazing feeling to finally finish what we had been working on for an entire year,” Graham said. “We all could finally get some much needed sleep and relax knowing that we worked so hard and finished the book.”
In celebration of the book being done, the staff is doing a weekend long SmugMug sale starting April 10. Photos will be available for one dollar while the sale is on.
You can get your photos here: https://timbercreek.smugmug.com/
