As Portola High celebrates its 10th anniversary, the yearbook staff is working behind the scenes to capture a decade of growth and a glimpse into the future.
Over the summer, students met to share their ideas and finalize a theme, according to Yearbook adviser Crystal Le. This year, the staff is weaving the school’s 10-year milestone into the book’s overall theme.
“It’s a very reflective piece,” Le said. “When something happens, after a decade, you’re thinking about those things, so it’s nice to have it wrapped up in a story and that’s what the yearbook is. It’s essentially a story of the school.”
In every yearbook, the staff focuses on three main aspects of Portola High: school events, sports and slice-of-life pages that add life to the yearbook, according to Editor and senior Neo Tian. Since these events are often time-oriented, the staff works on a set of pages each month, depending on what events and sports are ongoing. Even with this structure, the process demands strong time management and adaptability.
“What is stressful is really the deadline,” Tian said. “The book is almost 350 pages long every single year, and if you see the yearbook page, it’s massive. Content, photo design, there’s just so much stuff going on. We give you the confidence to handle all this work, but at the same time, it’s really hard for us to do it, but somehow, every single year, we still pull through.”
The cover features a prominent Roman numeral “X,” symbolizing the anniversary and establishing the theme for the rest of the publication. Students can expect to see this motif repeated throughout the book in various contexts.
“Whenever we go for interviews and whenever we talk or write an article, we always try our best to both reminisce about the past 10 years and also look into the next 10 years,” Tian said. “Ten is a very big theme. We want to revolve everything around—10 years back, 10 years into the future. That’s something that we’ve been trying to incorporate into our book a lot.”
Through long hours of collaboration and tight deadlines, Yearbook is preserving a milestone and encouraging others to reflect on their achievements and goals.
“It’s important to emphasize how far we’ve come, especially considering all of the achievements that Portola has accomplished despite it only being 10 years old, which is pretty astounding,” copy writer, clubs editor and sophomore Paige Revilla said. “I’m surprised at the level of achievement that I’ve seen from just two years being at the school already, and I’m really excited to see how the school is going to look in a decade to come.”