Most students include song lyrics, religious scripture or famous quotes for their senior yearbook quote. But the few that put inappropriate quotes can overshadow the hundreds of positive quotes.
For the 2025-26 school year, Round-Up yearbook will not include senior quotes. After administration voiced hesitancy in meetings with its adviser Katrina Hester, Principal Laura Springer and associate principal Colleen Lowry ultimately made the decision.
“If you want a simple reason, it is that senior quotes have a huge legal liability associated with them, and they require a massive amount of checking because of the number of potentially malicious, slanderous or inappropriate things that can be said,” Hester said. “The administration team decided that they did not have the bandwidth this year to handle that kind of oversight.”
In past years, both Hester and administrators would hold separate review processes of each senior quote, looking for slang, double entendres and hidden meanings, in addition to verifying quotes were accurate. According to Hester, between 10 to 20 percent of submitted quotes would be stricken yearly.
“It was this quite tedious process of reviewing everything and then having to strike some out that didn’t meet the qualifications,” Lowry said.
Senior quotes have ignited controversy across the nation after hateful blurbs slip through review processes.
“Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh almost lost his nomination because of what he chose to put in his senior year high school yearbook. It was a bunch of inside jokes that basically referred to him as being a drunk and having inappropriate relationships with girls,” Hester said. “I don’t want my students to end up on the national news because of something they thought was funny when they were 18.”
As scholastic journalism, senior quotes do not necessarily fit in with Round-Up’s goals.
“Last year we had some students who wanted to promote specific political opinions in their senior quote, and the yearbook’s position is not to be biased toward one side or another of political issues,” Hester said. “Ironically, this year I was less opposed to senior quotes than usual, because we have a theme for the yearbook this year that kind of lends itself to student voices.”
Hester said more than 20 students reached out asking her to remove their quotes after submission.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the yearbook is a historical piece, so if you say something you don’t believe in anymore, or against your future jobs perspective, it won’t be good,” Round-Up co-editor-in-chief Samanvi Sadak said.
Both Sadak and Hester said student feedback has been largely negative.
“I know a lot of my friends were excited for the senior quotes, and they were like, ‘What? We love quotes.’ Once I explained the whole reason, they understood,” Sadak said. “I think they feel their traditions are getting taken away, and so I did feel kind of bad when I said, there’s some more.”
In place of senior quotes, Round-Up is using the additional space for other personalization features. For example, it sent out the Big Senior Survey to students, getting insights into various aspects of student life.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten as many answers as we would have liked: last time I checked, we only had about 15% of the senior class,” Hester said. “ That’s actually been one of my biggest problems with senior quotes in general, because over the past two years, we would solicit and solicit and we never got more than 50% of the seniors even giving us quotes to begin with.”
Round-Up also greatly expanded its senior superlative offerings.
“We had approximately 20 superlatives last year. This year, we tried to get seniors to vote on as many as 66,” Hester said. “That means that 122 seniors have the opportunity to actually be celebrated in a superlative, almost 10% of the senior class.”
While Round-Up said that the quote removal is indefinite, according to Lowry, the decision could be subject to change in future years.
“Anything’s possible,” Lowry said.
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