On Thursday, the 1st of November Seniors were required to submit quotes to be evaluated and placed underneath their picture in the yearbook. Although the yearbook comes out June, the Seniors were excited and nervous to submit their quotes and many agonized over the perfect phrase to sum up their high school experience.   

Dr. Guertin, the teacher of the yearbook class, wants students to choose wisely when it came to their quotes and only gave them one chance, and hopes to weed out inappropriate submissions. Students did have the opportunity, however, to submit multiple quotes on their slip of paper incase they weren’t sure about their first choice.

Wilsonville High School was Dr. Guertin’s first experience with senior photos. “I didn’t have senior quotes, that wasn’t something Oregon City did. In fact, I had never seen a senior quotation under a picture until I came to Wilsonville,” she says. Despite this, she recognizes that many Wilsonville seniors are very concerned about their senior quotes. “I have noticed,” she laughs.

Dr. Guertin encourages students to choose funny quotes and says, “We want quotes that are humorous but not mean spirited. We were trying to avoid anything derogatory, sexist, racist, classist. Those are some of the things we had noticed before. We are making an effort to eliminate that from our yearbook.”

Vetting the quotes was more complicated than Guertin and her yearbook team  anticipated, but they did have a fun time decoding seniors’ special messages. “I am noticing quotes that have secret hidden messages which I appreciate the cleverness of them but I really can’t accept things that are spilling out bad words, referring to highly sexualized songs, or morse code. They don’t really have a place in the yearbook. We still go a good laugh out to them and it’s not like the weren’t appreciated in a different way.”