Los Angeles County High School for the Arts 2007 Yearbook

The high school editors kept hearing the aforementioned murmurings from their classmates. The yearbook would be depressing. Information technology would exist thin, if published at all. What was there to look back on, anyway? No prom, no football games, no grad dark. Just day after day of Zoom and sweatpants.

At the same time, the seniors lamented how their last year of high schoolhouse, in all its monotony, was passing them by. They feared that they wouldn't remember it.

"I tried to reassure them that we are working our hardest to really capture the year for what it is," said Suji Kim, editor of the Redondo Union High School yearbook, "that it is something we should commemorate and celebrate and not just shove to the dorsum of our minds."

Such has been the vital responsibility of loftier school yearbook staffs: to create an authentic yet compelling record of how their peers struggled through — and kept going in spite of — the pandemic. Their daunting mission has been to fill up scores of blank pages even though student life equally traditionally documented was all merely nonexistent.

The mission for Redondo Union High School's 25 yearbook staffers was compounded by the pressure of representing a nationally recognized yearbook. The bar was loftier.

Mitch Ziegler, the school'southward yearbook counselor of 31 years, kept reminding his staff that most people'due south mental images of loftier school come from the memories preserved in their yearbooks; 2020-21 was no different.

Back in the fall, the editors didn't know if or when school would re-open. And so they turned to crowdsourcing. Students and their parents submitted photos of teens skateboarding and mount biking, walking dogs, working on cars, baking bread. Like never before, life at dwelling house would dominate the yearbook.

Opportunities to have photos of their classmates were slim, and so staffers jumped at any chance to practice so. When the drama club was rehearsing its fall musical that would brand its debut on Zoom, a masked photographer snapped shots from a distance inside an actor's home.

But that was before the winter surge in COVID-19 cases. At that point, photographers had no choice but to teach their classmates how to take a selfie worthy of a yearbook portrait, directing them over Zoom how to angle their bodies and perfectly capture the light with their phones.

On a vivid and cool day in mid-February, when athletes were finally allowed dorsum on campus for conditioning as COVID-19 cases began to wane, a troupe of yearbook photographers descended upon the sports fields. Unremarkably, they don't even carp taking pictures of practice. Merely because at that place hadn't been whatever sports games, this was their run a risk to capture athletes in motion.

For about, it was their get-go time at school in almost a year.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Mitch Ziegler, right, Redondo Loftier's yearbook counselor for 31 years, leads photographers to the field to certificate lacrosse practice in February.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Marcel Sckesan, a senior, held his lens steady as he snapped shots of girls' lacrosse players darting back and forth across the field, sticks swooping through the air with each pass.

"Hey, Marcel!" one girl shouted, bounding upwards to him. "I'k so sweaty. Also, look at these!" she said, flashing pink acrylic nails at Marcel.

"I saw, they're really cute!" Marcel said, his eyes smiling back at her.

Information technology was nice only jarring, Marcel said. Here he was, interacting with a classmate he hadn't seen in then long, as if everything were normal. "It's similar no time has passed past because it's been the same thing over and over again, every day," he subsequently said.

The editors wanted to acknowledge this sensation of fourth dimension continuing still. Their yearbook would be themed "Considering of Yous," a reflection on how their relationships to themselves and others helped them detect meaning during an otherwise dour stretch of adolescence.

"Nosotros don't want to accept Zoom screenshots for every single spread," said senior Meena Kabbani, an editor at Redondo Union. "Only yearbook is a fourth dimension capsule of the year and we can't actually ignore the fact that nosotros're on Zoom 24-7."

But the staff was determined to go at something deeper than distance learning and new hobbies. This twelvemonth had been characterized by unending tedium, yes, just also of growth and transformation for many.

There would a spread that spoke to their relationship to the world — how the national racial reckoning in the summer of 2020 moved many Redondo Union students, half of whom are white, to consider their roles in systemic racism and inequality. They marched in Black Lives Thing demonstrations in the South Bay and L.A., while others spoke out on social media near constabulary brutality for the first fourth dimension.

There would also be a spread on students' human relationship to their more immediate customs — friends, parents, teachers, romantic interests — and how those connections grew and morphed.

The nearly introspective section would look at the human relationship to self and how the exploration of identity intrinsic to existence a teenager was intensified by and so much time alone. Students came out as queer and transgender, shifted their political views and tastes in music, experimented with mode. They became more aware of their mental health, the ups and downs and how they coped.

In the yearbook's introduction, editors wrote of the "unfamiliar silence without the marching ring practicing at 7 a.m." Of how, for once, "there isn't any traffic backup while students attempt to get to the science edifice for fourth catamenia. "

"But because of you," the text reads, "Redondo is louder than ever." Students are signing petitions, donating money to community organizations. Their Instagram feeds have become textbooks that they will really read, the editors quipped.

"We know the pandemic is bringing changes we've never experienced before," the editors wrote. "But the most important changes that will make this year special are the ones brought by yous."

Getting people to open up on this level, though, often took a lot of convincing — a challenge faced by many other yearbook teams across California. So editors take had to be abundantly patient and empathetic with both their classmates and fellow yearbook staffers, who take themselves missed deadlines and skipped grade.

"People just don't have equally much of an incentive to be in the yearbook correct now," said Ethan Bolos, a senior and yearbook business managing director at John A. Rowland High School in the San Gabriel Valley. "I've been left on read and ghosted so many times."

This year has besides stretched their networking skills; in normal times, they could just end a classmate in the hallway and ask them for an interview.

Jennifer Tan, yearbook advisor for Rowland Loftier School, watched her staffers form elaborate contact copse on Google Docs in order to reach students who've not yet been included in a yearbook spread.

"Information technology's a lot of 'I know a person who knows this person, I'chiliad in a club with so-and-so,' and tracking people down through social media," Tan said.

Most seniors, motivated by their last hazard to brand their mark in the yearbook, had their studio head shots taken by the February deadline. But but half of the freshmen, sophomores and juniors — who had to take their own — turned theirs in.

"Kids tend to exist upset if they're left out [of the book] by a mistake, and then it's eerie," said Ziegler, the Redondo advisor. "They just felt completely disassociated from school this twelvemonth."

In early April, the yearbook staff was finally dorsum together in Room 164; three-fourths of Redondo Union's student body had returned to campus, a much higher number than nearly California loftier schools. The editors peeked over the shoulders of staffers equally they worked on their 24-inch Apple monitors, a relief after communicating through Zoom breakout rooms and designing spreads on tiny Chromebooks for many months.

Photographers now had the herculean job of roofing the equivalent of iii sports seasons in the span of 8 weeks. Some sports were still hard to shoot — the boys' basketball team was quarantined afterward a COVID-19 outbreak. The rails team's meets were few and far between.

Against all odds, the editors are on track to brand their June 1 deadline, one calendar month shy of when they'd ordinarily ship the pages off to their publisher. Most 1,500 students had pre-ordered a yearbook, 500 fewer than usual. The book would be delivered to students in July.

For editor Suji Kim, who will nourish the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, it is a triumph.

"I might not have had a prom or senior ditch day," she said, "just at least I accept this yearbook."

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-22/highs-school-yearbooks-amid-covid-capture-historic-memories