The Champion High School yearbook staff finished and printed the 2019-2020 yearbook during the country’s mass Coronavirus shutdown while facing challenges like gathering information, printing, and distributing the books. The publishing house, Balfour, temporarily closed, leaving The Charger staff scrambling.
“Balfour shut down in March and so our books were put off and printing didn’t get done,” said current senior and Editor-In-Chief Carleigh Shannon. Not only that, the book wasn’t finished. They still had about 60 pages of Spring sports pages to finish. “Once the books were finally done they were delivered this year.”
The yearbook staff, unable to meet in person, were forced to leave many of the final tasks to the editors.
“It was really hard location-wise, where we were going to get it all done, because the school was shut down. Everywhere was shut down,” said Shannon. “We couldn’t take everyone from the class and put them together in one area.”
Since none of the staff had the software on their home computers to put the book together, yearbook staffers finished sections individually, then passed a hard drive off between members. They completed the yearbook at home with pictures they had left over from events pre-COVID and any photos they could gather.
“It honestly was kind of all over the place. We didn’t really know how to set it all up. It was basically finding a quiet place in your house where you could get everything organized and then you would have to go from there,” said Shannon, “There were a lot of Zoom calls, text messages, emails.”
Although they were unable to return to school, the yearbook staff maintained their yearly page goals while avoiding COVID-19. These pages feature school hosted social events including photos from the socially distanced graduation.
“We went up to 264 pages which was kind of a big jump for us,” said Shannon. “It was quite challenging because when COVID hit, we were like, ‘Okay, we have all of these pages left and nothing to put on them.’ So we had to last minute get them all together.”
The staff, using pictures from different sources like the parents, coaches, advisers, and students, ensured that the pages would be filled with a variety of people.
“It was definitely difficult to try to scramble together the photos that we didn’t have. We had to use a lot of outside sources,” said Shannon. “We were caught off guard.”
The Charger yearbook staff pulled together a 2019-2020 book that covered all events that the school hosted despite quarantine’s interruption leaving them without their usual programs or organization.
“We did the best that we could,” said Shannon. “There are errors; there are going to be little things, but we can only focus on what we did get done and how that came out. We can only grow from there.”