The absence of senior quotes has been the latest buzz around campus this year. While the yearbook staff has already made their final decision of excluding quotes from the 2018-2019 edition, many Freedom students are upset over the loss of a tradition.

Senior, Bethany Green, complained, “Senior quotes are something I looked forward to as a part of being a senior. It seems unfair that our class doesn’t get them.”

However, the staff didn’t come to the conclusion overnight. Schools around the country have made the news in recent years for not catching sneaky, inappropriate quotes turned in by seniors.

This past year, a pro-Nazi statement slipped through the staff at Andover High School in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the yearbook had already been published, and all the staff could do was provide stickers to cover the quote. The damage was already done, and the media broke the story shortly after. There are a growing number of stories similar to this incident.

The Freedom Yearbook Staff knows firsthand the impact of unseemly quotes from students. In the 2016 edition, one student became creative with her acronyms. As a result, the editors and staff hard work was overshadowed by one error.

Yearbook adviser Dan Sidwell explained, “I want the staff to be recognized for the hard work they put in throughout the whole year, and not an error that slips through.”

Typically, a quote goes through editors, advisers, and administration before its final publication. However, the responsibility of an uncaught error will still fall back on the staff.

Sidwell continued, “It is the goal of the yearbook staff to create a book that will be remembered for all of it’s great qualities, not one that will be remembered by something crude because a student was being slick. It only takes one inappropriate student to ruin it for everyone else.”

Many seniors are still upset that the tradition is being broken. Mackenzie Maddox, 12, expressed her frustrations, “It’s annoying that one person making an inappropriate quote ruins it for the rest of us.”

It is also important to add the quotes have only been included in Freedom’s yearbook for the past three years. Sidwell began printing them, and is now calling an end to the short lived tradition.

Editor-in-Chief Owen Barno, 11, clarified, “While we recognize the quotes are a tradition, we have come to the conclusion the time management and hard work our editors put in could be put to use in other aspects of the yearbook.”

“In the long run, senior quotes aren’t really that important,” Caden McCoy, 11, added, “They’ll be forgotten by the time we get to college, so there’s no point in stressing over it.”