Custom pages

By Blake Ellis  

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- As graduation day arrives, students will say goodbye to their classmates and teachers. And many are departing without a traditional yearbook to preserve those memories.

State budget cuts and the weak economy are causing elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges across the country to either do away with yearbooks or look for more cost-effective publishing options.

Research firm IBISWorld estimates that the traditional yearbook publishing industry has seen sales to schools decline by 4.7% a year over the past few years. The decline has come as both public and private schools struggling with insufficient funding put their limited resources toward areas like staffing instead publishing yearbooks -- many of which go unsold, especially in recent years as disposable incomes have suffered.

"Our country is handing out pink slips to teachers right and left, and if it comes down to teachers versus yearbooks, yearbooks are going to lose," said Marc Strohlein, principal at consulting firm Agile Business Logic.

Budget crunch

This is the first year that Indiana's Huntington University isn't offering yearbooks, after budget constraints forced the school to reallocate the $40,000 year it typically spends to publish 750 yearbooks.

"Budgets being what they were and the economy being what it was, forced our hand on this one," said Ron Coffey, Huntington's vice president for community development. "But I think given the economic times, the students are understanding of the difficulties that we and other schools are experiencing."

Students at Mokena Junior High School, in Illinois, won't be taking home yearbooks either, after the school district lost funding for all extracurricular activities this year. And Blaine High School in Washington is in the same boat, and likely won't be handing out yearbooks next year due to a severe lack of funding for the program. But while some schools are abolishing the keepsake altogether, others are turning to new online yearbook companies like YearBook Alive, Lulu, Lifetouch and Treering. Treering, for example, is an electronic yearbook company that lets schools design yearbooks, giving students the option of viewing them online, or ordering a printed copy for just $12 to $17 per book. More than a million photos have already been uploaded, and more than 50,000 students are using its services.

Treering says it is now providing yearbooks for hundreds of schools that would have otherwise eliminated the tradition altogether. Sales have soared 600% since the company launched two years ago.

The company estimates that each school saves an average of $100,000 to $600,000 a year in unnecessary printing costs.

"We just signed on with a school in San Francisco that was losing almost $2,000 a year in leftover books," said Aaron Greco, CEO of Treering. "It's just so crazy, because $2,000 could buy five computers with an education discount."

While the major publishing companies mass produce yearbooks using the traditional -- and expensive -- printing method of offset, electronic printing has improved so much recently that the quality is just as good, said Greco. The company will also soon introduce an online signing function, so students can digitally sign each other's yearbooks books. One inner-city elementary school with a large population of lower income students, Alvarado School in San Francisco, wasn't able to afford offering yearbooks at all until it heard about electronic options that don't incur costs on the school.

"Financially, it would have just been ridiculous to try to do it -- the school can't even afford paper and pencils, so to outlay money for a nice-to-have item like a yearbook wasn't even something that was considered," said Tim Smith, a parent and teacher at the school. This year, nearly half of the school's 484 students bought yearbooks, averaging only about $13 each. The others were still able to create yearbooks, view them online and share them with friends.

Breaking with tradition Budget crunches aren't the only reason for the shift. Huntington University's Coffey said while the school's budget crunch was the main culprit, students are simply more interested in reliving school memories with photos and comments online. Electronic yearbooks give students the ability to customize pages, and share them using social networking sites.

"The personalization makes it into something about the student, not just the school," said Greco. "We're seeing a death of the traditional yearbook and an age of the personalized yearbook." Coffey wonders whether social media and Facebook will eventually replace yearbooks altogether.

"Our view is that interest in yearbooks has waned to some degree," he said. "It's not that no students are interested, but with the advent of Facebook and other social networking opportunities, these are often more readily available and interesting venues than the old yearbook world." But the disappearance of such a long-standing tradition is always hard for some people to accept. "The tradition is the biggest factor -- it's always hard for students to think of life without it," said Coffey.

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District Administration Magazine Awards Treering 2010 Readers’ Choice Top 100 Product

District Administration—the most-read magazine of America’s school district leaders—announces Treering as a recipient of the Readers’ Choice Top 100 Products of 2010.

Redwood City, CA – December 2, 2010.— Readers of District Administration are the top public school administrators in the country, and they know from experience what works and what does not work within their districts. As part of its annual award program, District Administration asked its readers to nominate the hardware, software, books and materials, Web sites, or facilities products that have made a positive difference in their districts in 2010.  Treering’s customizable yearbooks that eliminate costs for school’s earned the distinction this year in its first time nominated.

The winning products were determined by the quantity of nominations received per product as well as evaluating the quality of readers’ nominations and explanations. The 2010 winners were selected from hundreds of nominations received over the last six months, a significant increase in participation from the previous year. “These product recommendations included extensive descriptions from school administrators of how these products are used in their districts, making it very challenging to choose the top 100 products. We hope these products, and their accompanying testimonials, will act as a valuable resource for our readers,” says District Administration’s editor in chief, Judy Faust Hartnett.

“This year’s winners were a very diverse group of products, ranging from classroom resources to district-level management tools,” says Kurt Eisele-Dyrli, products editor. “Many of them, from online assessments and notification systems to thin clients and projectors, enabled readers to do more with less, which reflects the challenging times faced by many school systems.”

“It is an incredible honor to receive District Administration’s Top 100 Product award.  It’s quite humbling to be mentioned alongside Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle as the best products of the year for schools.  The excitement our customers have for our product drive us to continue to improve the product and revolutionize how yearbooks are created and purchased.” said Kevin Zerber, Treering Co-Founder.

Technology lets students, parents layout personalized pages in high school yearbooks
By KAREL HOLLOWAY / The Dallas Morning News

Yearbooks can be a big rush or a real letdown.

Lots of pictures of your child and it's great. Just the formal class picture and maybe a glimpse of a cute face at the back of a group and the big book seems a waste.

Yearbook companies are springing up to help avoid disappointment, offering schools and parents a digital way to make the books more personal.

Treering, headquartered in California, says it was the first company to offer schools personalized pages in yearbooks. Parents, or the students if they are old enough, can lay out their own pages with photos and text and add them to the standard book.

Co-founder Chris Pratt remembers his daughter bringing home her book with just two photos of her.

"It didn't capture her memories," said Aaron Greco, who started the company with Pratt.

The company started last year, using a digital process to offer personalized pages. Greco said other companies now are springing up to offer similar services. Several area schools, including some in Rockwall and Wylie, are using Treering, he said, though he would not say how many clients the company has.

The digital process is called print on demand.

Instead of setting up pages and then printing them on a large offset press, Treering pages are similar to documents on any computer. Pages can be added or deleted almost as easily as attaching a file to email. Books can be cheaply printed, one individualized copy at a time.

That means the yearbooks can be truly personalized. Schools using the system no longer have to place large orders, or large deposits, in advance.

Schools create 80 percent of the pages online – this is the traditional part of the book. But parents automatically receive other pages they can use as they want, uploading pictures and text of their child.

Once the book is finished, parents, students, or others, like grandparents, can order the book they want. It can have no personalized pages or dozens.

Because of the streamlined digital process, the books are often 20 to 30 percent cheaper than other yearbooks, Greco said.

"One mom that had three kids at the school had 16 pages for each kid." Greco said. "The pages were beautiful."

Parent volunteer Tonya Fenoglio is in charge of the yearbook at Rockwall's Hartman Elementary School. She said Treering seemed an easy choice.

This is the first year Fenoglio has been the yearbook coordinator. She searched the Internet to see if there was a better option than the company the school had used for years.

She found Treering and liked the ability to personalize pages and the lower cost.

"All the other yearbooks seemed really outdated," she said.

She has already created the pages for her daughter. They include pictures with her friends and activities from first grade. Other parents have gone online to finish their students' pages as well.

Fenoglio says she likes the chance for parents to add personal details such as teacher names and important days.

"They'll kind of have a Life at Grace Hartman Elementary School," she said.

EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE:

A growing number of schools, including Scotch Plains-Fanwood and Baldwin Senior High School, on Long Island, are also using new publishing technology offered through companies like... Treering to give every student the option of personalizing a yearbook by adding pages to fill with photos and memories, at little or no additional cost. Scotch Plains-Fanwood’s yearbook advisers, Julie Whitty and Amy Rutkowski, said they hoped the customized pages and more inclusive approach would increase their sales; in recent years, about half of the students bought yearbooks, which start at $75 this year.  READ FULL ARTICLE ON NYT