This year, the journalism staff created the largest yearbook this school has ever had. It has 12 more pages than last year’s book and is a bigger book size than all previous years.

This book was a product of 31 students’ yearlong efforts: taking pictures all the time at school, going to nearly every event that the school held and not to mention the many hours working at home after school.

This year’s book is formatted chronologically, meaning that it starts from the beginning to the near end of the year, following sports, events and students.

To ensure that all of the pages can be printed on time, the yearbook must be finished before the school year ends. This meant that all the pages that were in this year’s main book had to be finished by April 7.

Now, if everything had to be submitted two months before the end of school, how does the yearbook include events like prom and sports games that happened after that? Well, the book has something called a supplement. It’s an extra little 16 pages between pages 88 and  89 that was printed separately from the big book so that you could remember Mr. CAHS 2016 and play production forever. The journalism staff inserted 810 supplements into every single book by hand. Yes. By hand.

For the school-wide distribution, most of the journalism staff spent all of first and second period setting up Caiman Hall: taping big signs with letters to form lines, inflating many balloons and hanging streamers. There were two staffers for each letter group helping to pass out the books, one who would find the student’s name and get them to sign for their book and then another to run and grab the correct color.

The whole journalism staff is so invested into these books, which consumed this school year for them, taking the grand majority of whatever free time they possessed and even sometimes requiring coming to school on Mondays. We are thrilled when we see students happily gazing at the pages and passing them around signing them, and we cringe when we see a book accidentally fall to the floor. The amount of time, work, blood, sweat, tears and love poured into these books has made them what they are. We hope that you enjoy our commemoration of the 2015-16 school year even a fraction as much as we do.