Believe, Strive, Succeeed was the motto of Aledo High School, Texas, USA when I was there
In my final year in America I took an option called Yearbook at my High School open to students who had previously taken Journalism – US classes can be made up of people from different years.
What’s a Yearbook?
A glossy ‘coffee table’ publication, bigger than A4 size a few hundred pages long with a custom designed and embossed cover. Crucially – with a print run typically over 2,000 depending on the pre-orders and a purchase price in excess of $50 (I think it was $69 that year) – it is a huge source of revenue for the school. In excess of $100,000 - potentially over $200,000 especially when advertising and any sponsorship is added in.
There was no play learning about the Yearbook module - the primary and middle schools had full time paid employees to produce slim 40 page creations.
Yearbook was a product-driven journalism course. The unpaid minions, sorry students, sold advertsing – cold calling local companies for example, marketed it with the school, wrote stories, took photographs, added captions, planned, designed and laid out the school yearbook before sending it to a Dallas publishing company – all the time driving towards a strict printing deadline. Using tools such as Microsoft Word, Adobe PageMaker and Photoshop we operated in work teams – one of which I led - working in a business style environment – lots and lots of tight deadlines reflecting the fact that there was such a lot to do.
We were very proud of the end result however.
southworth-barlow
