by Adam Levine ’20

This year, Sherwood’s yearbook has a new sponsor, English teacher Kelly Schlutz. After 16 years at Northwest, spending five as the sponsor of the newspaper, Schlutz is taking over the yearbook program, previously led by English teacher Lori Leonard.

Schlutz’s biggest goal for this year is to remove lots of the copy, or words, from the yearbook, and leave it chock full of pictures. “I’ve looked at a lot of the past years’ yearbooks, and they are filled with copy. In other words, people have to actually read the yearbook, and I truly believe yearbooks are meant to be looked at, pictures, and not read,” Schlutz explained. “My big charge this year is to eliminate a lot of the copy, stick to headlines, captions, and quotes.”

Schlutz also is looking forward to working with and developing relationships with the students. She hopes to bond with them, Schlutz said, because they spend will a lot of time together putting out a product they all can be proud of.

The process of creating a yearbook starts with creating a ladder, or the framework of what will go on each page, of the book. Once that is complete, staff members get to work designing spreads with picture, caption, and headline boxes. Currently, the staff is approaching their first big deadline, with about 60 pages already completed.

“We also take ideas from our cover of the yearbook, and we take those same designs and repeat them throughout each page of the yearbook,” Schlutz described. “Once we have all that down, we can start placing our pictures, … headlines, … captions, and … quotes, and things kind of start to come together.”

Schlutz believes her experience with the newspaper program at Northwest will aid her in her first year of sponsoring a yearbook program because it gave her experience with meeting deadlines, gathering advertisements, and managing a large team of people and making sure people are doing what they need to do. “So far, I’m enjoying yearbook more,” Schlutz said. “It’s more creative.”

As the sponsor, it is Schlutz’s job to handle the yearbook’s finances, make sure each student is on track to meet their deadlines, and ensure that the final product is put together on the inside and out.

Senior Hyacinth Heo, one of the five editors-in-chief of the yearbook, emphasized that the editors-in-chief are trying to work extra hard to acclimate Schlutz to this new type of publication. “Because Ms. S is still learning, [we] editors-in-chief are trying to put more work than most editors-in-chief would because we’re also helping her to create the best book we can,” Heo explained.

In addition to helping out the new sponsor, Heo is spending her third year on the yearbook staff designing pages, assigning pages to staff members, and overseeing the content on each page. The editors-in-chief also edit pages on separate editing days and help staff members gather content for their pages.

Heo has stuck with the yearbook program for three years because she enjoys the people and the process of creating the book. “It’s fun to design pages and to see the outcome later on,” said Heo.