Under the direction of the English Educational Coordinator Jennie Clopton, students at the Pivot North Bay campus produced the first ever Pivot North Bay school yearbook.
At the beginning of the school year, Ms. Clopton asked her students to vote on a club they would like to start and gave them a few ideas, including drama, creative writing and yearbook. They chose yearbook and began meeting weekly.
The students decided that even though the experience at Pivot is very different from a traditional school, they still wanted something to document their school memories and to include photos of all the students who attended classes on campus during the 2014/2015 school year. Even more importantly, the students really wanted something to give to the graduating seniors as a memento of their last year on campus.
“Every club on campus gets a $300 annual stipend. The Yearbook Club decided the best use of those funds was to subsidize the cost of the yearbook for all graduating seniors. It was really important to them that every single graduate got to leave Pivot with a copy of the yearbook as a memory of their time at Pivot”, said Ms. Clopton. “The students wanted to keep the cost of the yearbook low for all students, so they found a way to produce and print it for $20/book. And with their stipend, they were able to lower the cost to $10/book for the graduating seniors.”
Editor-in-Chief Emily Thompson led the Yearbook Club. According to Ms. Clopton, Emily really took the reigns on this project and oversaw it from start to finish. She did much of the layout work herself. She, along with the rest of the group, was very hands-on in taking all the photos, writing all the captions and content, and laying out the book. When asked about the experience, she said, “I learned a lot from this club; the process, team work, and everything in between. It never could have been done by an individual, and I think working together with friends made this whole process more enjoyable. Even though there was a deadline and things needed to get done, the book just never would’ve turned out the same without those crazy friends of mine.”
For this upcoming school year, the Yearbook Club has decided to evolve into a Newsletter Club instead, in order to reach all the students who are on campus throughout the year. They will produce a monthly newsletter with photos, events, volunteer opportunities and a Spanish section for parents who speak Spanish only. The newsletter will be distributed monthly to current students and their parents. At the end of the school year, the entire year of newsletters will be compiled and published in one annual book. Hats off to these hard-working, thoughtful and dedicated students!