Because the school only goes to 8th grade, the “seniors” are 14 years old. Their superlatives hit different.
Then there is the page no one talks about: The Departures. It’s a grid of small, grainy photos. Twelve faces. Twelve names. Below each, a line reads: “Moving to Anchorage / Fairbanks / Juneau / Texas.”
Midge has already drawn a small star next to her own photo. “My dad got a job at the airport,” she says flatly. “I’ll be gone by August.”
She is currently designing the page that will come after The Departures. It is a single photo of the empty playground. The caption reads: “The swings still move. Even when no one is on them.”
Perhaps the most beloved feature of this exclusive is the foreword. It is not written by the principal, the valedictorian, or the mayor. It is written by Mr. Harold Vance, the school’s 74-year-old janitor who has worked at Frontier Primary since the day it opened. frontier primary school yearbook exclusive
In three pages of elegant, cursive script, Mr. Vance describes the school as a living organism. He writes about the pencil marks on the doorframe of Room 12 (measuring the growth of 1,200 children over 50 years). He recounts the night the boiler exploded in 1985 and how teachers formed a human chain to carry sleeping kindergarteners to the gym. He ends with a sentence that has become the motto of this year’s edition: “A school is not a building. It is a pile of stories that refuse to die.”
No other publication has printed this foreword. Only this frontier primary school yearbook exclusive contains the full, unedited text.
Inside the final yearbook of Frontier Primary School, where every face is a front page.
By [Author Name]
FRONTIER, Alaska – The shutter clicks at 10:17 on a Tuesday morning. It is 14 degrees below zero. The children are not wearing coats.
They have run outside in fleece pajamas and mismatched snow boots, because in Frontier, the bus doesn’t wait. The bus never waits. And neither does the truth.
For the seventh graders of Frontier Primary School—a speck of a building wedged between the boreal forest and a gravel airstrip—the production of the Frontier Flyer Yearbook is not an elective. It is a coronation. It is a census. It is the only proof that they existed at all.
“Everyone talks about the ‘real world,’” says Margaret “Midge” Hollander, 13, the yearbook’s editor-in-chief, wielding a pair of safety scissors like a scepter. “But here, the yearbook is the real world.” Because the school only goes to 8th grade,
This is the exclusive, behind-the-scenes story of the 48-page, spiral-bound document that costs $12 and will outlast every person in it.
This isn’t just a collection of class photos and honor rolls. The Frontier Exclusive is built around a single idea: you belong here. Every page echoes with the sounds of our school – the morning assembly songs, the drizzle on the rooftop garden, the click of library counters, and the whisper of “You can do it” before a spelling bee.
“When I look through these pages, I don’t just see faces. I see futures being built.”
— P6 Student Editor, Frontier Yearbook Committee 2026