While March 13 may have left students celebrating Diamond Bar High School’s temporary closure until April 20, the Taurus Yearbook staff were faced with challenges instead. 

Since then, they’ve finished the 150 pages that were still incomplete, but the yearbook’s fate remains largely up in the air due to the unprecedented coronavirus outbreak.

“When the school first closed, we were nervous because we had one more week until the yearbook was due,” junior editor Stephanie Pan said.  “We didn’t know if we could push back the deadline. Thankfully [the publisher] agreed to push the deadline [indefinitely].”

Most of the unfinished work revolved around spring sports, but with school closed, there was no way the staff could get enough photos to complete their spreads.

“For the spring sports that don’t have enough pictures, we will combine them to one spread and cover it as spring sports during corona,” senior Editor-in-Chief Fiona Huang said. “For the rest of the spreads, we’ll think of new coverage ideas to fill the pages, mostly relating to how the coronavirus has affected the school year.”

Another reason why the staff initially struggled was using Adobe InDesign without ePage, a program most high school yearbooks use to export pages, which made it difficult to send the finished layouts to the publisher. 

“The first week after school got cancelled was super hectic and we didn’t know what to do because it wasn’t possible to cut down pages in the book,” Huang said.

Since then, they’ve downloaded additional extensions from the publisher, Herff Jones, to keep the operation running smoothly. Staffers were instructed to continue working on spreads at home on their school-assigned laptops that were equipped with InDesign.

“We also had meetings now and then so we could update everyone on what was done and what needed to be done,” Pan said.

Yearbook then uploaded layouts to their Google Classroom for the editors-in-chief to approve. After this, the layouts were sent straight to Herff Jones.

“We’ve done all this so hopefully the seniors can at least have a yearbook,” Huang said. “I’d feel bad if everything was cancelled for our class and we don’t even have a yearbook.” 

The staff has completed and turned in all the pages needed to print the yearbook. Currently the editors-in-chief and Yearbook adviser Stacy Tenace are working with DBHS’s administration to figure out how to distribute the yearbook.

While they currently plan on a summer release, it may prove difficult to contact seniors who have graduated. As of now, the yearbook’s distribution remains unconfirmed.