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Yearbook company’s partnership with Trees for the Future results in land restoration and food access.

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Treering, a technology company that offers high-quality yearbooks and affordable prices, today announced that in partnership with Trees for the Future, more than 4 million trees have been planted. Treering’s mission to preserve the history of each school year can be costly for the planet, and that’s why for every yearbook sold, they have planted a tree.

Inspired by the concentric rings from the cross section of a tree, Treering’s name exemplifies the company’s mission to promote sustainability and make a positive impact on our planet. Because of the company’s environmentally-friendly focus, it’s been a proud member of the Green Business Program since 2015, along with over 2,800 other California-based companies. They are the first yearbook company to receive this certification and one of the first education technology companies.

“As an environmentally focused yearbook company, reaching this number of planted trees is a huge milestone for us,” said Kevin Zerber, CEO & co-founder at Treering. “It’s been an honor to partner with Trees for the Future as a way to bring our sustainable mission and environmental roots to life along the way. We also pride ourselves on printing on partially recycled paper and only produce the exact number of books parents buy, eliminating unnecessary waste and resources. When we reduce unused paper products, we save trees and make a more positive environmental impact.”

For more than 30 years, Trees for the Future has been planting trees around the world, planting over 210 million trees in more than 40 countries. Through a farming system called the Forest Garden Approach, Trees for the Future is teaching farmers to restore their degraded lands and lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. Each Forest Garden is home to thousands of trees and provides sustainable food and income opportunities for the farming family.

“Trees for the Future is planting more trees this year than ever before. Despite the challenges brought on by the pandemic and a changing climate, support from partners like Treering makes lasting change possible,” said John Leary, executive director at Trees for the Future. “We’re grateful for the ongoing support from Treering and are excited to share this 4 million tree milestone together.”

Each tree that is planted through the partnership is planted in the name of a school, which gives the schools a lasting legacy for hundreds of years to come. Additionally, each school that purchases yearbooks through Treering is provided with a badge to put on their school website as a way to honor their environmental contribution.

For more information about Treering, visit https://www.treering.com/. For more information about Trees for the Future, visit https://trees.org/.

About Treering
Established in 2009, Treering is a technology company that offers high-quality yearbooks at affordable and transparent prices by updating the outdated yearbook industry to allow for inclusivity, flexibility, and sustainability. For more information about Treering, please visit: treering.com.

About Trees for the Future
Trees for the Future is a registered 501 (c)(3) nonprofit working to end hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation through agroforestry training. Trees for the Future has planted more than 210 million trees around the globe and has helped more than 200,000 people. Learn more at trees.org.

Staff Report | El Paso Herald-Post

Del Norte Heights Elementary Takes 2nd place in National Yearbook Contest

Officials with Treering announced Thursday that Ysleta ISD’s Del Norte Heights Elementary School took second place in the nationwide #TreeringMemoriesMatter Challenge.

The 2nd place honor was awarded to the Del Norte Height’s staff for their yearbook spread celebrating a 2020-21 school year staple: fashionable face masks for socially distant learning.

Earlier this year, Treering – a digitally produced, published-on-demand yearbook company for K-12 schools – called on all its customers’ editors to send in a 2020-21 yearbook spread that shows the uniqueness of the year and students overcoming the challenges it’s brought for the #TreeringMemoriesMatter Challenge.

After weeks of judging from a panel of Treering team members, the spread won the school a $50 Amazon gift card, 5 free yearbooks for their school, and an art block of their award-winning spread for display.

“Del Norte Heights couldn’t have predicted that their students would bring high fashion to the classroom via face masks this year. That’s why their submission to #TreeringMemoriesMatter showed off all the amazing face mask designs that helped students learn safely and in style,” Treering officials shared via a news release.

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Elementary School in Centennial Wins National Yearbook Competition

Hannah Metzger | The Denver Gazette

Lenski Elementary School in Centennial has been named the first-place winner of the Treering Memories Matter Challenge, a national yearbook spread competition.

Treering, a California-based company providing digital printing and customization for K-12 school yearbooks, created the competition to encourage yearbook staffs to showcase the uniqueness of the 2020-21 school year in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Preserving our children’s memories is so important and this year it was even more so from a journalistic standpoint,” said Kristina Cruz with Treering. “Given the various COVID safety protocols in schools, parent volunteer’s and teacher’s work was made even more challenging.”

Lenski’s winning yearbook spread showcased students celebrating Valentine’s Day with their pets, as they were not able to celebrate in-person with their classmates this year.

During remote learning in February, Lenski students exchanged the photos of themselves with their pets from the spread, in lieu of handing out Valentine’s Day cards.

“Their yearbook spread was not only beautifully designed but did a great job representing the uniqueness of how their community decided to celebrate Valentine’s Day,” Treering’s announcement said. “What other year would our pets make the yearbook?”

For winning first place, Lenski received a $100 Amazon gift card, 10 free yearbooks and an art block of their award-winning spread to be displayed in the school.

Second place went to Del Norte Heights Elementary in El Paso, Texas. Plumas Charter School in Quincy, California and Pelham High School in Pelham, New Hampshire tied for third place.

Nearly four dozen other elementary, middle and high schools from around the country also received honorable mentions for their yearbook spread submissions.

Lenski Elementary School is a public school within the Littleton Public Schools district, serving students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Lenski was designated as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence by the U.S. Department of Education in 2013 and 2019.

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YISD Elementary School Face Mask Yearbook Page Wins Prize in National Contest

Maria Cortes Gonzalez | El Paso Times

Del Norte Heights Elementary students have a reason to smile underneath their face masks.

The school won second place in a nationwide challenge to submit a yearbook spread to showcase the uniqueness of the 2020-21 school year and overcoming its challenges.

The contest was sponsored by Treering, a published-on-demand yearbook company for K-12.

The school in the Lower Valley submitted a layout spread of numerous kids wearing their face masks in style. The pages were dubbed "Fabulously Fashionable Face Masks."

Elyse Hernandez, the school's instructional technology support who creates the yearbook, said the theme for the yearbook came to her pretty easily.

"The title is 'A Year Like No Other #COVID-19' because it was " she said.

Hernandez said her idea for the face mask layout came from thinking of ways to feature the students despite the challenges of teaching remotely.

"A yearbook really documents a year in a student's life," she said. "And it was a year when everyone had to wear face masks so let's celebrate that."

The school won a $50 Amazon gift card, five free yearbooks for their school, and an art block of their award-winning spread for display.

Hernandez hopes the special recognition encourages more parents to buy the yearbook for their children. The book costs $25 and includes two pages that parents can personalize with their kids' pictures.

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March 26, 2021

Joy Halverson, a Physical Education teacher at Journey Charter School in Aliso Viejo, has gone out of her way to capture the memories of this school year. Instead of school portraits, she takes screenshots of all her students. The yearbook is a true reflection of the year, and using Treering allows a lot of flexibility for students and parents to make the yearbook their own.

‍See the full video on NBC Los Angeles

• Planting a tree for every yearbook sold
• Partnering with a green-certified printer to produce our yearbooks on recycled paper
• Recycling and composting as many materials in our office as possible

 

• Not sell student information
• Not behaviorally target advertising to students
• Use data only for authorized education purposes
• Not change privacy policies without notice and choice
• Enforce strict limits on data retention
• Support parental access to, and correction of errors in, their children’s information
• Provide comprehensive security standards
• Be transparent about the collection and use of data

Ways to Implement Safe Social Media for Schools

If you believe that social media is just another fad that will come and go, you should stop reading this post right now. I won’t be hurt. However, if you believe that networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have become an integral part of our lives, but you’re struggling to safely incorporate them into the classroom or your schools, this is for you.

We’ve all heard plenty of anecdotes about the number of people who use social sites like Facebook or Twitter, but some of the most fascinating data I’ve read exposes exactly how much time we Americans spend using social media. In their 2012 earnings report, Facebook revealed that 48 percent of 18-34-year-olds check their account immediately upon waking up.

Possibly even more surprising, Experian claims that 27 percent of total U.S. Internet time is spent on social networking sites.

To say the least, social media is occupying more and more of our online time and in many ways is becoming a preferred method of communication. This begs the question: how do we educate today’s students on the best practices of using social networks?

I’m not a teacher, so I won’t pretend to understand the challenges of day-to-day life in the classroom and hallways, but I do know a thing or two about how social media can help or hurt your life, depending on how you use it.

1. Teach Students Blogging

Before there was a Facebook or Twitter, many of us were honing our creative writing skills by jumping into the blogosphere. Especially when combined with photography, blogs way to share my experiences and emotions with family and friends.

And blogs have something special built into them: just like social networks, blogs give us instant feedback. I can tell by the number of comments I receive what types of stories my “audience” enjoys, and inversely, which stories don’t resonate so well.

I love writing blogs about travel, for example. My father-in-law once gave me feedback that he thought a story I had written had too much of a negative voice. At that moment, I didn’t really agree, but upon further reflection, his critique reinforced my goal of keeping the blog as a place of inspiration instead of complaints.

The point is, by blogging on a regular basis, I found a team (my audience) who would provide constructive criticism that not only helped improve my creative writing skills but also gave me the opportunity to practice self-critique and reflection.

Some schools are turning to sites like Kidblog to bring safe blogging into the classroom. Kidblog makes it easy to emulate an adult’s “real” world blogging experience in the safety of the school by allowing you to set up an account for your class in a matter of minutes.

Your classroom activity is not publicly viewable on the web and students don’t need email addresses to create accounts. The best part of bringing blogging into the classroom is that besides getting a team of classmates to provide feedback, they get you, their teacher, as a coach.

2. Create a Social Media Class

While it may be challenging to bring a social network like Twitter into your classroom or school (or flat out disallowed by your school district), another option is to create a social media class. With a structured environment that the teacher controls, there is a tremendous opportunity to teach students about using these platforms as creative writing and communication tools.

This is exactly what Clifford Elementary School in Redwood City, California did. Teacher Jessica Schifrin taught a full-time technology class at Clifford, covering topics like social networking and desktop publishing.

When I met Jessica this fall, she told me that she could measure the progress in her students over the course of the year, mentioning that things they found appropriate to post early in the school year were later viewed as questionable or unacceptable. Self-critique in action.

Why do I feel that it’s so important to educate students on the ramifications of their activities on social sites like Facebook? Take one major technology company for example (I won’t call out any names). In this company’s current interview process, they require candidates to provide Facebook login credentials to get a closer look at their personal lives.

If they don’t like what they see, they can choose to use it as criteria to dismiss the candidate from the interview process. Perhaps someday legislation will be passed to prohibit this policy, but even then, it’s clear that our actions on social sites like Facebook and Instagram have certain permanence.

I’ve heard many teachers say that it’s a parent’s responsibility to watch over their child’s behavior on social media, and that’s true. But many parents I know are not nearly as nimble as their children when it comes to navigating social sites or keeping up with the latest hot network.

I know parents that are supervising their kid’s behavior on Facebook. Meanwhile, their daughter is ten times as active on Twitter or Instagram. Supervising is only half the battle. Providing education and tools that go from one network to the next is the other.

3. Create a Virtual Hallway

One area of school life that has a built-in tradition of capturing photos, memories, and stories from the year (the original Facebook) is the school yearbook.

A few companies, like Treering, are focused on helping students capture their very best memories and experiences from each school year through the vehicle of the school yearbook. This is done through an online portal or mobile app that allows students to share photos and memories with the rest of their school. Students then get to have their photos physically printed in their personal copy of the yearbook at the end of the school year.

Tools like Treering are private only to the school, providing a safe environment for each community. Additionally, (and here’s where the virtual hallway comes into play) they are always supervised by a parent, teacher, or administrator who oversees the yearbook production and approval process at the school.

I think there is something sacred about the yearbook – where students recognize that it’s not the place for inappropriate comments, photos, or remarks – that goes beyond supervision.

It moves closer to respect and the comprehension of what it means to take pride in something. Perhaps it has something to do with the vivid understanding that a printed book is here to stay. That teachers, parents, and even grandparents will get to see its contents. This is a bridge between social media and a tried and true practice at your school.

While it’s difficult to comprehend the permanence of things we do on the web, it’s easy to pick up an analog object like a yearbook and see that it will be around for a while. Students can see that it’s something they engaged with and helped build.

By marrying social media experiences with vehicles like the yearbook that already exist in your school, there exists an opportunity to pass along best practices and common sense to students, helping them avoid some of the pitfalls and traps of today’s web-based world.

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