PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — It’s hard to capture the story of high school in a yearbook, but over the years Presque Isle High School students have made the tradition of publishing theirs look easy and have again been recognized for their creativity and hard work.
Presque Isle High School’s 2016 yearbook was recognized by Balfour Publishing for its eye-catching cover and a heartfelt spread recognizing seniors from the class of 2016 who lost a parent, making it three years in a row the school has been commended by the publisher.
The New England Scholastic Press Association, headquartered at Boston University College of Communication, also recognized the 2016 yearbook.
“I sent it in for judging and we found out that we won first place overall for schools in our division, which is 400 to 700 students,” said Marcie Young, the publication class adviser.
Yearbooks are traditionally critiqued on their overall theme, photographs, graphic design elements and the story the yearbook tells about the school and its students.
Each spring, Balfour Publishing, the Texas-based company behind many high school and university yearbooks, including the University of Miami, Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, Texas A&M and many others, puts out what they call the “Yearbook Yearbook,” a selection of the best of the best from the yearbooks they publish. And the work produced by the Presque Isle High School publication class has made it into the special issue three years in a row.
“Getting the recognition makes it feel like we’re being recognized for all of our hard work that people don’t always realize we do, so it helps boost confidence and know that you can make a good book and try harder the next year,” said Elise Guerrette, a Presque Isle High School senior who’s been a part of the publication class throughout her high school career.
“I think we really try to tell the story,” Young said, indicating that the students seek to avoid using a cookie-cutter formula that covers pep rallies and sports clubs. “That’s so easy to fall into, that sort of formula. Obviously that stuff happens every year, but we are trying so hard to challenge ourselves to find what’s unique about every school year and the students who are here and I think that’s something that’s shown through.”
The work on a yearbook begins the year prior to publication, and once that book is out, students are already hard at work putting together next year’s collection of memories.
An inside spread of the 2016 award winning Presque Isle High School yearbook.
“When you come back to school in the fall is when you tell the new students what the goal is for this book and you assign different jobs for different people,” Guerrette said.
The final deadline for the yearbook is always set for the end of March. Presque Isle publishes its year book in the spring so seniors on their way out the door won’t miss the latest edition.
Each year students sell thousands of dollars worth of ads to businesses and parents to support the publishing of the year’s book.
“We have a strong tradition of yearbook support in Presque Isle and at the high school,” Young said. “We are very fortunate that more than half of the students buy a yearbook. We’ve had advertisers going on their 25th year straight of advertising. It’s just a great tradition.”
