commitment to diversity
In 2019, a category 5 hurricane and earthquakes struck Puerto Rico. Since Orlando has a significant Latino population, many hurricane victims sought refuge here with extended family throughout our community. Our Puerto Rican student population dramatically increased. I designed this spread with staffer Emma Thalasinos, who thought of the idea to create a spread to recognize the students. I drew the landmarks that students discussed in their quotes about their home utilizing ProCreate on the iPad. Emma was extremely beneficial to this project because, since she is bilingual, she spoke with these students and translated their answers. Incorporating their stories into our 2020 yearbook highlighted how they became such a large part of our school that year. The 2020 theme was "The Turning Point," which fits these students' stories because of how all of their lives hit turning points when they had to move to Central Florida.
published in the 2020 Legend Yearbook
published in the 2020 Legend Yearbook
In a critique of the 2020 yearbook, we received the comment that our sports spreads lacked diversity in terms of team levels (varsity, junior varsity and freshman). Usually, we focus on the varsity teams only, but this year, I made it a goal to feature junior varsity and freshman players as well. In the spread above, the story, dominant photo and photo cluster in the bottom left are all focused on the varsity team. The mod on the bottom right features a junior varsity player and the mod in the center left features a freshman player. While the varsity team is still more thoroughly covered on the spread, the other teams are highlighted, which adds more inclusivity.
to be published in the 2021 Legend Yearbook
to be published in the 2021 Legend Yearbook
In May of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement impacted the entire country. Attending the protest in Downtown Orlando, I saw familiar faces of classmates and saw even more social justice participation on social media. Through this experience, I realized that students really cared about this issue in society and I wanted to document it for historical purposes and so the students could remember the influence they made on the community. The bottom half of the page is a photo I took of the protest at the Orange County Courthouse on May, 31. I also took the photo of the boy in the rainbow shirt. We used the photo of the girl holding the "No Justice, No peace" sign with full permission from her. This spread displays diversity in our content as a yearbook because, usually, we do not cover events that happen in the summer. However, with this becoming such a prominent movement in history, covering activism as a whole became important.
to be published in the 2021 Legend Yearbook
to be published in the 2021 Legend Yearbook
student master
As a staff, we try our best to be as inclusive as possible when creating content. On our student master, we have every student's race and gender listed next to their names to ensure this (I only included first names for privacy). It is important to have an equal number of boys and girls on a spread, when the spread topic is applicable. For example, it is impossible to have gender diversity on spreads like football or cheerleading if you don't have anyone of the opposite sex participating on those teams. We use the student master to keep track of what students are used on what page. If a staffer turned in a group of student names to an editor that lack diversity, whether it be gender or race, the editor would ask them to find different students to create more diverse content. Since we are a very diverse school, it is important to make sure everyone is equally represented in our publication.
|