Laptop-themed yearbook reflects student life ‘through a screen’

Hundreds of students walked the halls of a central Hamilton high school with silver MacBooks in hand.

But these laptops have no USB ports and, when opened, reveal pages, not keys. Instead of an internal disk, they are loaded with a year's worth of memories.

Like the school year, Cathedral High School's 2020-21 yearbook is anything but typical.

We wanted something that would really reflect the pandemic we were going through," said Chiara Fricano, editor of last year's edition of Orbit." All of our interaction with our peers ... was through a screen."

Hamilton schools were closed for more than three months last academic year amid surges of the COVID-19 virus.

The annual publication, delayed several months by pandemic-related disruptions, was released April 12, 2022.

The inside cover is designed to look like a student's screen on the first day of school, with several open windows: a YouTube video of back-to-school COVID-19 protocols, the school board news page, and the daily screening tool's green banner and check mark.

The student council page is set up like a Teams meeting, with president Mario Rallo highlighted as speaker.

Instead of sections for photos of sports and clubs - nearly all of which were cancelled for the year - the yearbook displayed pictures of masked students and staff chronologically, designed like Google Photos.

Students shared photos of remote learning - at desks, in beds and with pets. When in a physical classroom, they were masked and distanced.

Fricano, now a life sciences student at McMaster University, said this approach was the yearbook committee's way of rolling with the challenges presented by unprecedented times."

What better time to really step outside of our comfort zone in the ordinary and try to bring entirely new ideas to light," she said.

Yearbook adviser Monica Di Gregorio said the theme was definitely a 180" for Orbit," crediting colleague and co-adviser, Matt Trabucco, with the design and confidence to achieve it.

Matt is a creative genius," she said. He ran with it."

Trabucco, the head of technology studies at the Wentworth Street North high school, said months of work went into Photoshopping and laying out the book - the first time in landscape format.

Working with even a skeletal student yearbook committee was a challenge, given the flip-flopping between in-person and remote learning. When schools were open, accelerated octomesters" (one subject at a time schedule) made it difficult to have regular meetings.

We only had them for 20 school days and then they were on to the next course, so it was definitely challenging to keep to our timelines," Trabucco said.

The book's final page ends with a familiar message: Are you sure you want to quit all applications and log out now?"

After months in front of a screen, undoubtedly many students were.

Kate McCullough is an education reporter at The Spectator. kmccullough@thespec.com