Five, six, seven, eight and one… The music played, the First Ladies danced and at their sides were 135 little ladies, looking up in awe at their talented role models. more

After tirelessly searching your house and digging through boxes full of items from years past, you finally find what you have been looking for: your high school yearbook. The instant the book is held in your hands, memories from some of the best years of your life flood your brain. Opening the book, you gasp in awe as you recall moments from high school that you forgot happened. You hold the yearbook close to your heart and cannot help but to smile as you flip through the pages reminiscing about stories past. The value of high school yearbooks is not to be overlooked; they are treasured by many when first received and are a source to the past for nostalgic graduates. Yearbooks not only highlight the previous year’s accomplishments, they embody the finest memories made by the student body all featured in one hardback book. “Yearbooks document the school year- nothing else does that,” Texas UIL Journalism Director Jeanne Acton said. “It’s so important that we capture that history. I still look at my high school yearbook. It’s incredibly helpful in helping me remember my high school time.” Over the past 30 years, yearbooks have rapidly evolved due to the introduction of new technology. During the early to mid 80s and even into the 90s, yearbooks were typed on typewriters and pictures were cropped using croppers and grease pencils. Today, yearbooks are edited digitally using computers and pictures are cropped with the latest digital Photoshop programs. “During the twelve year span from my time as a staff member and yearbook editor-in-chief to advising yearbooks I saw major technology changes,” WHS yearbook advisor Paige Dyer said. “I was used to working with IBM computers in the 90s, now everything is created with software designed for desktop publishing. It’s all digital, the books are even sent in as digital versions, which cuts down on printing errors.” In this technological day and age, many people are questioning whether or not printed yearbooks will continue to survive. After all, some schools have started to put their yearbook strictly online, meaning that there is not a printed copy of the book. However, many people continue to buy printed copies for sentimental reasons. “To me, the printed yearbook is important because technology changes so drastically,” Balfour Publishing representative and former WHS yearbook advisor Debbie Vaughn said. “We don’t even know what technology will look like in 20 years, but I still have my printed yearbook from 1979.” The production of the 2017 yearbook marks the 70th anniversary of the WHS yearbook, ‘The Wildcat’. After listening to critiques from judges at the state and national levels for the past two years, senior editors are not only making the yearbook traditionally community-oriented as it has been in the past, they are also incorporating elements that will boost state and national recognition for higher ranking awards. “I’ve put a lot of effort in trying to cater our book towards competition standards and I’m excited to see how it will do at competitions with all these changes,” current Whitehouse yearbook editor-in-chief Anna Pardoe said. “I’m excited about producing the yearbook because it’s something that will be in our community forever and it’s exciting to know that all of the work that the staff and I do will be looked at for centuries.” more