With only seven students on the committee, the Kamehameha Schools Maui high school yearbook committee was awarded the 2013 Award of Excellence by Jostens, the yearbook publisher, on May 10.

“We’re really happy that we won this award because there was so little of us, and we actually could pull this off, which was really surprising,” said three-time yearbook committee member sophomore Shai Ibara.

The 2013 yearbook was chosen by the Jostens state representative from among nearly 70 Hawaiʻi schools that use Jostens to produce their yearbooks.

Jostens’ uses three criteria to determine which schools will receive an award — inclusion, coverage, and management. Yearbooks should include “a vast majority of the student body,” according to their Web site. Meeting production deadlines and making sure that every student gets a yearbook are also important parts of the judging.

The staff said that the 2013 yearbook contains changes in layout, format and design.

“We did a chronological yearbook this year, so it’s different from the ones we’ve done in the past. In the past, there have been different sections like [an] academics section, athletics section, clubs and [that] kind of stuff. But this year there’s fall, winter, and spring,” said award-winning yearbook adviser Mrs. Naomi Ashman.

In addition to implementing the design changes this year, there were other challenges that the committee had to overcome.

“Because there were so few [staff members], each student had a lot that they had to cover,” Mrs. Ashman said.

Another challenging aspect was that within the committee of seven, only three had previous experience, and there were no seniors participating this year.

The committee members are: Juniors Kamalei Batangan, Kyana-lei Yamada, and Shane Naeole; and sophomores Shai Ibara, Whitney Reyes, Maile Sur, and Destinee Murray.