A new school year brings new preparation and new excitement. This is no different for the BSM Sangraal yearbook staff as they welcome new members to their team and start crafting the 2024-2025 school yearbook.

This school year we will be presented with the 51st BSM yearbook. Without fail, the yearbook staff works hard to improve the book each and every year and make it special in its own way. The book’s name, “Sangraal”, comes from a special chalice used by knights.

Each year, the yearbook team gains new staff members with fresh perspectives and new suggestions for the format, design, and content of the yearbook. “I can bring new ideas and designs that the more experienced staff members haven’t seen before to add to each of the pages,” sophomore Madeline Yacoub said.

One of Yacoub’s favorite parts of being a yearbook staff member is getting to be a part of something that not every BSM student gets to experience. She enjoys working with upperclassmen that aren’t typically in her classes. Although upperclassmen and underclassmen have different roles within the yearbook, they regularly collaborate with each other to make the best product possible. Underclassmen work on creating pages, and editors are there to advise them in the process. “In the yearbook class, I’m really trying to embrace that editor is just a title. We don’t want to be these all powerful people who act like we know everything,” senior Lauren Carlson said.

Not only is the yearbook staff implementing new ideas and gaining new student staff members this year, but they also have a new temporary advisor, Dr. Emily Anderson. Anderson is a long term substitute teacher for Paul Canavati, the usual yearbook advisor. Anderson is very excited to be a part of the yearbook team this year and has already had a great experience. “I would say the highlight has been, for the first time, working in a classroom that is so student-driven…This has been a really different experience. It’s been a big learning curve. But I think ultimately me relinquishing control and letting the editors run things has been, you know? Good for them, and good for me,” Anderson said.

Although Anderson will only be the yearbook advisor for a short period of time, she has a few new ideas to bring to the yearbook. “I would love to see the yearbook consider itself to be a little bit more of a journalistic enterprise…by focusing on making this year’s theme come alive through journalism, through interviews, through writing,” Anderson said.

This year specifically, the yearbook staff is focusing on new methods to hopefully streamline their process. “We had some errors last year that people ended up finding. It’s hard when you have so many pages and not a lot of time to do it…so hopefully with our new editing strategy, we will check and catch all of these, and nothing will go past us,” Carlson said.

The yearbook staff members are excited for this upcoming school year, and eventually, for all the students at BSM to see their hard work pay off when they receive their yearbooks in May!