After months of curating a theme, taking photographs, and designing pages, the 2025-2026 Yearbook was submitted for publication on April 10 and distribution of the book is planned for the first week of June. With the theme “The Power of One,” this year’s yearbook focuses on individual success while still expanding on school wide events like athletics and academics.
In previous years, the yearbook’s theme has consistently focused on the entirety of the student body, especially with last year’s theme being a 25th anniversary book. However, this year’s book is a new look into this school year, giving students a distinctive, refreshing theme to be able to view when looking back on the school year.
“We were going for a yearbook based upon everyone’s individual impact at SBHS, so that’s why the title is ‘The Power of One,’” junior Editor-in-Chief Nivaeh Raffenbeul said.”I like the theme this year because we haven’t had an individual based book in a few years, so I was excited to create a book focusing on everyone in our school.”
Prior to the school year, a couple of Yearbook students attended a James Madison University summer camp to start brainstorming the theme, designing mock pages, and curating various fonts and colors. Walking away from the experience, students had a vision board outlining their style for the book that included graphic elements such as ripple effects and circle shaped photos accompanied by bright neon colors.
“One of the things that made yearbook camp so memorable was the late nights spent in the dorm commons working on the yearbook because we were able to have fun with it while also creating something so cool at the same time,” Co-Editor-in-Chief Sierra Saylor said.
Even with the basics of the book planned out before school officially started, the making of the yearbook proved to be a difficult, demanding task. After overcoming simple issues that accompany any Yearbook team, such as improper formatting or technical issues with the designing program, there was an overall difficulty with adapting to the personal and differentiated theme of this year’s book.
“Something that was challenging this year compared to last year is that last year gave us a lot more choices and a lot more content to draw from, and so this year there was a lot more creativity we had to bring to the table,” yearbook advisor Leah Onderdonk said. “We had to think of a lot more new ideas and new pages that we wanted to do compared to last year where they were kind of given to us by the nature of an anniversary book.”
Additionally, last year was Ms. Onderdonk’s first year as the advisor for the yearbook. Overseeing such a cumulative task comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility that exceeds normal teaching hours. Ms. Onderdonk’s first year was not easy, but the anniversary theme gave her time to find her footing and prepare her for the following years.
“I think this year we’ve improved in many ways,” Ms. Onderdonk said. “Last year was my first year as advisor, and so I think it was challenging to keep our rules consistent. I think this year, there’s a lot more cohesion in terms of our elements and our themes. I also think there’s a lot more consistency in terms of using the right font when we’re supposed to.”
With a sound structure of the class created, the students are given clear directions on what spreads they are designing and how to go about completing them. Alongside this, the editors poured an immense amount of work into the class as they were responsible for helping approve the final designs for pages to help deliver a creative and well thought out book for students to collect at the end of the year.
“I think overall, being in a leadership position, specifically Co-Editor in Chief, has made Yearbook more fun but definitely a lot more challenging at the same time,” Saylor said. “I really enjoy having some creative freedom and being able to help design the entire yearbook, but it is also a lot more work to have to look over all of the staff members spreads and make sure everything looks good enough to submit.”
Even with the challenges of taking on such a position to create an extensively detailed book exploring the many different lives of students, editors and staff succeeded and are ready to be able to start distributing the books once they arrive at the school. From the first week of June up until the end of the school year, yearbook staff will be at the school’s indoor concessions to distribute purchased yearbooks during all blocks.
“We have worked so hard for the past couple months and to finally finish it feels like a big moment,” Raffenbeul said. “We hope that students feel seen since this book was more focused on how one person can impact a community, so hopefully people can relate to it.”
Here is a sneak peek at some of the spreads that made this year’s yearbook, “The Power of One”:
