Why Rethink Yearbooks exists
Rethink Yearbooks makes personalized yearbooks for elementary schools, so a child’s copy can hold their own class, grade and friends, not just a portrait and a class photo. It started at an elementary school’s yearbook distribution, where children turned the pages looking for themselves and found one or two photos at most.
How did Rethink Yearbooks start?
Our founder was there as a parent, at a child’s elementary school yearbook distribution. What stood out was how disappointed the children were. They were looking for photos of themselves and their friends, and there were hardly more than one or two of any one child. To fit more photos onto a page, some had been printed so small that it was hard to see anyone in them.
That was the moment the format itself looked like the problem: one shared book, a fixed number of photo spaces, and a whole school to share them between. It no longer matched the way families take and keep photos today.
After years of waiting for yearbook companies to change that, we built the yearbook we wanted our own children to open.
What was wrong with the yearbook?
Yearbooks took their shape when photographs were scarce. A single printed portrait could stand in for a whole year, and for some families it was the only photo they had from that year.
Now almost every parent has thousands of photos on a phone, and they are harder than ever to go back to. The yearbook did not change with them. A shared book still has a fixed number of photo spaces and a whole school to fill them with, so it records who attended and says much less about what the year was like.
When adults talk about their old yearbooks, they rarely mention the quality of the headshot. They talk about people: who they sat with, what they were into that year, the friends they have lost track of. That is the part a yearbook is for, and it is the part most books have the least room for. Why some children barely appear in a shared book →
What does Rethink do differently?
We kept the school yearbook and added to it.
- The shared book stays shared. The school plans and designs its book in Canva from free templates, or takes our free First Draft and edits from there. Every child is in the shared school pages, and every family who orders gets that book.
- Families can add pages built around their child. Families who choose the personalization upgrade, +$10 a book, get myClass and myGrade pages: 35–60 candid photos from their own child’s class and grade, drawn from the photos the school uploads. The upgrade also puts the child’s name and photo on the cover, and lets the family add two custom pages of their own if they want to.
- Nobody has to build those pages by hand. They are put together from how the school organizes its photos, by class, grade and event.
How often any one child appears on those pages depends on how often the school photographed them. We can only use the photos a school collects, which is why we spend so much time helping schools collect broadly. How it works →
What do we believe?
- Every child belongs in the school’s book. Personalization adds pages. It never takes a child out of the shared ones.
- A child’s year is their class and their friends. A portrait proves they were there. The candids show what it was like.
- Volunteers should not have to be designers. The coordinator’s real job is collecting photos, so we offer to draft the book for free and give those hours back.
- A good book should not depend on parent homework. The personalized pages build themselves. Custom pages are an option, never a requirement.
- Children’s photos are for the yearbook. Coordinators download their photos by 1 July, the photos are deleted around 1 August, and only the final yearbook files are kept longer, for reprints. How we protect student photos →
- Prices should be published, not negotiated. Softcover books from $20, personalization +$10, hardcover +$9, with no setup fee, no deposit and no order minimum. Every price →
- Say what we cannot do. We cannot put a child into photos nobody took, and we would rather tell you that now than in May.
Who is behind Rethink Yearbooks?
Rethink Yearbooks was founded by a parent and former AI/ML research scientist. We are a small company, Second Innings LLC, based in Santa Clara, California. We have served elementary schools since 2020, mostly in California and Texas, and we print every book in the USA, about three weeks after the school approves it.
Families can reach us at support@rethinkyearbooks.com, and coordinators at admin@rethinkyearbooks.com.
Run your school’s yearbook?
Book a 30-minute walkthrough and we will show you a real personalized copy, or get a quote and a sample for your school.