Newspaper and yearbook students attended a Balfour summer workshop June 22 and 23 at Whitehouse High School. The camp teaches students how to become better journalists, photographers, and designers.

“I like spending time with everybody, I like getting to know the students better, [and] like that the advisers get to know each other help each other out,” Balfour representative Debbie Vaughn said. “It makes it easier for my staff when school starts.”

In camp students form a plan for the rest of the school year. The yearbook students plan a theme for the yearbooks while the newspaper students formulate ideas to make their writing and design of the website better. 

“This is one of my favorite [camps] of the summer just because it’s smaller and a little more intimate,” Leland Mallet, Legacy High School Newspaper Advisor said. “There are always good kids in good schools.”

The camp is two days straight of hard work in order to prepare for the upcoming school year. Students work on their industry-standard skills including photography, InDesign, and Photoshop. 

“The most difficult part of camp is probably coming together and compromising in all of our designs because we all want one thing and we are all trying to compromise but it is very difficult,” junior Olivia Harwell said. “In the end, we are going to come together and we are going to make an awesome yearbook.”

The two staffs included team bonding into their days at camp by incorporating games and conversations in order to kickstart the upcoming school year. Vaughn also included a game that involved group participation with individuals from different schools, which taught responsibility.

“I like that we are really getting to grow and get to know each other at camp,” junior Reeci Morgan said. “We’re getting to learn more about how to improve our yearbook and just to get really good ideas and inspiration from the people around us. Getting to learn in here from a lot of other schools and people was really cool.”