Lessons Learned from Switch to a Spring Delivery Yearbook

When I started advising yearbook at my alma mater, I was pretty set on being a fall delivery book; it was what I knew. After a few conversations and seeing how other schools could successfully put out spring books and the support of my stellar rep, John Kelley, I was eager to jump to a spring delivery.

The Adjustment

I’m not going to lie, this was a big change for myself, the community and my staff, but in the end I found it completely worth it.

From the hundreds of books left over in my room from the last 12 years, to the dread of staying after the last day of school to work on the book with the very few staff members who still had any motivation, to worrying about who was going to help pass out books at registration in the fall, the list goes on and on, the idea of being done in March or April was very intriguing to me.

My EIC wasn’t the happiest about the change because “what about my senior tennis season?” Neither was my sweet and sassy staff member who lost her mind about once a week over the idea of completely curating a baseball spread in 2-3 weeks when the season had barely started, but we did it.

I repeat, we did it.

Was it an uphill battle? Yes. Did we make a lot of mistakes? Of course. But are we ready to do it again? Absolutely.

The Year

I never felt totally lost. With my rep John, Mike Taylor, local advisers in my area and all of the content Walsworth has on spring deliveries, there was so much available to me. I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, and I certainly wasn’t going to act like I was.

We had Mike visit our school a time or two, John is always quick to respond with help, Elite Weekend changed our lives, and Jim Jordan gave us a critique and a bunch of advice at the JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention in Boston. There was support for us at every turn.

Something I loved about the change was the more frequent, smaller deadlines. In my very first year, only the first 80 pages were due the day we left for spring break, but this year the whole book was set to be done by then! That was mind boggling to my staff, but why were we still touching up the Homecoming spread in March anyway?

The chunking of deadlines made submissions feel so much more manageable and forced my staff to move on from spreads that should have been done months beforehand anyway.

Distribution Prep

This felt like the craziest part. I had no idea how to distribute almost 600 books in one day. Thanks to the Walsworth Advisers Facebook Group, and my colleagues in the Kansas City metro, I developed a plan that was super successful, and I was in disbelief when we were done passing out in 30 minutes.

I watched the distribution webinar with Jim and Sabrina, where I got the idea to print tickets. I color coded them based on: plain book, name stamped book, book with year-in-review/autograph supplement or name stamp with year-in-review and drilled into my staff the color coded meanings. If they brought a white ticket in exchange for their book, my staff didn’t even have to think, they just handed them a regular book, which was 71% of our orders.

Each day my staff came to class, I welcomed them to what I called my sweatshop. We organized name stamp books and add-ons by which table buyers would be picking them up at. We sorted the color coded tickets by homeroom and delivered them to those teachers the morning of distribution day. We made posters and maps for the room set up, and we played practice scenarios of distribution day.

I was a crazy person, but when the day came they were very familiar with the names that would be coming to their table, the expectations, and were able to pass them out so quickly.

Once our plan was solidified, I posted a plan to our student news website and shared it out in emails and our weekly broadcast.

Distribution Day

That morning, myself and a few students ran the tickets around to homeroom teachers. I sent enough emails that 99% of them knew what I was handing them. I had several colleagues offer to help as well, and I put them to work directing traffic and breaking down boxes.

We set up on the auditorium stage, played music, counted how many books would be needed at each table and set the appropriate number of boxes there.

When it was time, we dismissed homerooms by seniors first, then by other parts of the building. I kept an eye on the time as we had an assembly to try and not interfere with and texted our admin assistant each time I was ready for an intercom announcement based on when the room would start to clear out.

We passed out about 450 of our 563 orders in 30 minutes and I couldn’t believe it!

I had been so stressed about executing it, but thanks to all of the resources I had through Walsworth and the planning and organizing we did in my sweatshop, it was nearly perfect.

The community has loved the students ending the year with books in their hands and signatures on the pages. Plus, I already have fewer books to pass out this year than I still do from last year!

Long Story Short

If you think you’re ready to switch to a spring book, you are. And let me just say, the people at Walsworth are so ready and willing to support you in any decision you make!