Filling a hole out of need, NHS’s new yearbook advisers are working hard to create this year’s annual while learning the job on the go. But, with creativity and passion fueling their journey, they know they will find themselves with a product in which they take proud.

Mrs. Tracy McClowry and Mr. Kyle Falk are both teachers at NHS, and while their subjects are quite different from each other, they are coming together with ease to create the yearbook.

McClowry runs the Transitional Learning Center program, where she gets the opportunity to fully explore her creative sensibilities and work one-on-one with students, a style of teaching she has known she would prefer since the beginning of her career as a substitute teacher in the district.

Falk is a business and financial literacy teacher, thrilled that his dream of returning to Neenah after student teaching at the school has come true — especially in combination with getting to teach a subject he loves — pointing out that his background in marketing taught him valuable skills that he gets to show off in the yearbook.

While neither of the advisers participated in the yearbook as students at their own high schools, Falk and McClowry found that creating the yearbook came with ease in collaboration. McClowry says that one of the biggest challenges has been “finding that there’s not enough pages for all the things we want to do.”

The two agree that they melded well together and have bright ideas for the yearbook of 2021-’22. But, they do not want to undervalue the student opinion. Falk in particular mentions, “For me, one of the rewarding pieces is being able to see students participate in the things that they’re excited about, they’re passionate about, and get that into the yearbook.”

Not just spending time actually creating the yearbook, the pair also collaborate on spending time outside of the school day to attend and photograph events to fill the yearbooks pages. They at least touch base on what they are working on daily, highlighting communication as an important skill. 

Outside of a job or a group of skills, creating the yearbook is an art. “You’ll see more writing in the yearbook than you have in the past… say on a sports page it would identify people but there wasn’t anything else, this is where we anticipate there being a story about the season,” McClowry highlighted. The newest edition of the NHS annual is sure to be filled with new kinds of creative expressions to energize yearbook committees of the future.

While they cannot share any new segments of the yearbook, the leadership teases that there may be a peek at the cover available before the book is released. Only two months into the school year, they are already approximately 25 percent completed with the touchstone — “Already having covered the entirety of the fall events in anticipation of the yearbook’s release at the end of the school year.