By Maiya Tomlin
This Friday, February 26th, is the hard deadline for the completed yearbook for the 2025-2026 school year. That means all the names have to match all the photos. All the senior superlatives need to be in with the most likely to do this and the most likely to do that. And every last club and organization needs to be featured.
In celebration of seven months of work coming to a close, I spoke to members of the yearbook staff to see how they’re feeling.
I first spoke to two juniors, Valeria Benitez and Janey Aaronson, who are second-year staff members of the yearbook. “I’m pretty good with all my pages. It’s just hard to get people to reply to emails about quotes and stuff. But other than that, it’s been pretty good,” Valeria told me. Janey told me she, too, has thankfully finished all of her pages, but disclosed, “It does get really hard towards the end of the second semester, towards the end of February. It’s stressful having to get [it in at] the last minute.”
Valeria is a two-timer publications student, both yearbook and newspaper, so I asked her if she applies any newspaper skills to her yearbook duties. Valeria told me she applies her newspaper skills of acquiring quotes to work with. For her, it is occasionally difficult to get students to respond to her requests for quotes, but I can vouch that the newspaper does, in fact, teach you to be persistent and go to unimaginable lengths to acquire an interview.
I wondered which year was more difficult; both agreed that last year was 100% harder. “Last year was harder because we were sophomores, we were sophomores, and we were new to it,” Valeria told me. “You don’t really know what you’re doing, so it’s difficult,” Janey added.
Side note that I recently discovered: the older the staff member (junior then senior, etc), the more priority you have over which pages you complete. So if a senior loves, let’s say, middle school baseball (it could happen!), they are most likely to be able to claim that page.
So, how does this impact the underclassmen? I then spoke to Molly Rees, a sophomore who is undeniably going through the sophomore slump.
I found Molly in her eighth math tutorial of the week and asked her how she’s enjoying her first year of yearbook. “It’s great. It’s really fun,” she said. I was confused by her response because in August, Molly told me she didn’t love it.
Molly’s number one concern right now is responding to the feedback she got on her pages. “I have to do all of my edits by class tomorrow,” she told me.
The two editors of the yearbook this year are seniors Nadia Infante and Ridley Sands. Nadia, who has never been mean a day in her life, has to occasionally assert her dominance to ensure that every staff member stays on task and meets their deadlines. “I don’t yell, but yeah, I do have to get feisty. Well, I don’t get feisty, but I just remind people constantly,” she told me.
This has been her favorite year of yearbook because she enjoys editing. In addition to occasionally completing pages, she and Ridley oversee everyone else’s work.
Coincidentally, Nadia’s little sister, Naomi, is a sophomore staff member, and Nadia ensures her pages are up to par with the Infante legacy. “Naomi’s pages are actually pretty good,” Nadia admitted.
Finally, for the 2025-2026 school year, Mrs. Koningsmark (widely known as Mrs. K) stepped down from being the yearbook faculty advisor, and Mr. Jarrell took her place. I had the privilege of being taught by both of them, and I would say they are definitely the type of people who can keep 19 girls having fun and bonded, as well as keep them in line if needed. So, I was curious how the switch went.
I spoke to Mr. Jarrell, who told me, “I spent the whole week editing pages, two or three hours at home every night.” It sounds like his first year is going well!
During our conversation, I looked around the yearbook room off the IT helpdesk and noticed at least 10 past-year covers hung on the walls.
I asked Mr. Jarrell how the process of choosing the cover works. “Early on in the process, in the fall, we meet with a graphic designer, and basically we explain what our idea is to the graphic designer,” he said. “They sort of do a really quick little thing like a mockup while we’re with them on the Zoom call, and then a couple of weeks later, they come back with the finalized idea, and then we can come back and say, oh, we didn’t like this, we didn’t like this, and they’ll revise it.”
So, how did his first year go, overall? “I survived,” he told me.
