'Uncertain but certain': LaVille yearbook adds positive spin to bad year

LAKEVILLE, Ind. - Most people remember their years spent in high school, maybe even middle school, and what better way to reminisce than to look at old yearbooks.

But is 2020 really the year these kids want to remember? One high school in Lakeville is putting a spin on the narrative.

“I enjoy helping almost like document our school's history because it's going to be there forever," Megan Kurzhal, a LaVille High School Yearbook writer said.

Flipping through old yearbooks…. is a stark reminder.

"How different the year is," Jozee King Cook, the LaVille High School Yearbook Editor said.

A year that has been anything but normal.

"With masks and stuff you can see their social distancing in the pictures, and with sports you can see that the stands are kind of empty, and we're also putting that into our copy on our pages, we're talking about how the team dealt with covid this year and if they missed any games because of quarantine or anything like that so you can definitely tell that like this year is different, just by opening the book," King Cook said.

For King Cook and Kurzhal, creating a book for students to cherish for decades down the road has been a challenge.

From event cancellations...

"Not being able to go to events to take pictures because of like limited capacity,” King Cook said.

"When students have masks on, it's hard to identify them, because like half of their face is covered," Kurzhal said.

To simply not being able to see everyone’s smiling faces.

"With students being virtual it's really hard to get a lot of coverage of kids in the yearbook, so we have like the same students over and over for each thing, whereas we have a lot of students virtual this year so it's really hard to try and include them in the book," she said. "We try to make sure we have as many kids as we possibly can in the book, and we try to make sure we get like a good picture of like the shot of their face rather than like their backside."

So what could they do with a yearbook for a year like no other?

"We also couldn't really like, figure out what kind of theme we were going to go with because we didn't want it to be very negative because everything is already really sad and everything," King Cook said.

Instead of accepting this year as a lost cause, the yearbook team decided to own the uncertainty.

"So we took like a positive spin on it and made it uncertain, but certain. And so that's kind of what our theme statement is we're uncertain how the year is gonna go but we're certain that we're going to be able to make the most of it," she said.

That means bright colors.

"Colors are very poppy and 70s there's a lot of flowers and cool like groovy fonts like oranges pinks blues,” she said.

And positivity laced through the 128 pages.

“I feel like you just feel like a happy feeling just looking through the book," Kurzhal said.

"We're also using really positive language with our theme we're saying how even though we weren't able to do this, we still were able to enjoy like the moments we had together and we're grateful that we could come to score with each other and see each other, and we could still play sports, even though it was a little bit different," King Cook said.

"Looking back I would want to see just like a positive memory because it has been such a rough year for a lot of students, like being able to see the positive and I think it's going to be really helpful for a lot of kids and remembering how the year went," Kurzhal said.

Fundraising has also been an issue, leading the yearbook staff to get creative. King Cook said they are already working on creating fundraisers for next year to be able to support the funds they missed from ads this year.