A big anniversary usually calls for a big celebration, but it’s not often the celebration itself wins national awards.
But that happened this year when Leyden High School District 212 won national recognition with two awards for its 100th year bash.
The National School Public Relations Association awarded the district’s communications team a Golden Achievement Award for the year-long centennial celebration and an Award of Excellence for the documentary video series the team did as part of the anniversary project.
Both awards will be given July 23 at a celebration in Washington, D.C.
The celebration kicked off last fall to coincide with the founding of the school in 1924 and it ran the duration of the school year, with homecoming events, a gala fundraiser and a family picnic in May. Besides the events, the school district produced signs, a mobile exhibit of historic school artifacts and created a five-part documentary series exploring the stories and the people from the school’s history.
Karen Geddeis, the district’s director of communications, said she wanted the ambitious project to celebrate and commemorate, as any anniversary might. But she also wanted the year to celebrate community partnerships with the district and to raise funds for the school.
In other words, she wanted the celebration to remind the community that the district still needed local support.
“We wanted to raise additional funds for our Leyden scholarship foundation and we also had so many community partners,” she said. “People really love Leyden. Our businesses and our community is really amazing. We knew it was there and this was a moment to really see and formalize those partnerships.”
Geddeis has been with the district five years, and she always knew the community supported the school. But this project really illustrated how much the school cares about its students and its legacy, and how many of those students, and graduates, still love their alma mater. She said she and her communication team worked for about a year planning for the event, and all along the way, as the project grew in scope, she had help.
“It’s not very normal,” Geddeis said of the size of the celebration. “This was very ambitious.”
Maybe the crown jewel of the celebration was the documentary series, available on the district’s YouTube channel. Each five-minute episode of “Leyden: Making History” focuses on a person or people — the oldest alumni, coaching legends, graduates. And each video demanded hours of footage as well as an entire custom-built soundstage for interviews. Luckily, Geddeis wasn’t working alone and she credits her two-person production crew for their long hours spent on the documentary.
“We knew video would play a role,” she said. “We weren’t really sure what that would look like and we knew we wanted to capture stories of our students, staff and our alumni.”
One of the video production specialists, Brandon Delgado, is a 2018 graduate of Leyden. He said working on the “Leyden: Making History” series meant a lot to him both as a video professional and because of his history with the district.
“This was special because we were going deep in the history but we didn’t want to do just a timeline,” he said. “We wanted to put together something that resonated with the viewers.”
For this, he was eager to dig deep and spend more time with subjects and spend more time in the editing bay.
“We actually built a set,” he explained. “We booked our theater for a week and we brought out all these artifacts from Leyden’s history.”
As it happened, all the subjects were more than happy to sit for hours and hours of interviews. In total, the documentaries were whittled down to about 30 minutes total from 12 hours of footage, which itself was a big feat.
“It felt like such a monumental thing, and something that many districts would not be capable of,” Geddeis said.
Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.