Des Moines Register Register Student of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Register's Student of the Week is and who runs it

The Des Moines Register Register Student of the Week is a weekly recognition program for central Iowa high school students, run by The Des Moines Register, the Des Moines newspaper whose education desk publishes the ballot at desmoinesregister.com. It is not a business ranking and not a paid entry contest: supporters simply pick a nominee on a public ballot, and the newspaper names the nominees each week.

The voting itself runs on poll.fm, a Crowdsignal property and the same polling platform many US publishers use for quick reader polls. The current ballot address is https://poll.fm/14774731, which serves the latest poll in the series and marks a finished week as closed. On a closed ballot the page also shows the final tally, so a visitor can see how the week finished without voting.

The market is Des Moines, Iowa, and the nominee schools on the December 2024 ballot, Lincoln High School and Adel Desoto Minburn High School, show the catchment stretching beyond the city itself into the surrounding districts. In the best-of vertical this program is a reader-voted award, but its subjects are students rather than businesses.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for this weekly Iowa student poll

Confirmed editions of the Register's Student of the Week ran in 2023 and 2024. Within a season the program is a series of weekly ballots rather than a single standing poll, and the ballot months observed across the 2024 season are March, April, September, October, November and December. That pattern is what gives the program its September through April span: it follows the Iowa school year, pauses over the summer, and resumes in the autumn.

The most recent ballot in the series is dated 12-16-24 and is titled Vote for the Register's Student of the Week (12-16-24). It is closed. Its published tally had the leading nominee, from Lincoln High School, at 60% with 10,259 votes, a second Lincoln High School nominee at 39% with 6,713 votes, and a nominee from Adel Desoto Minburn High School behind them. Those figures are the only vote counts the ballot page displays, and they belong to that December week alone.

What the Register has not printed anywhere on the ballot is the exact open and close date of each weekly poll, the nomination deadline that produces each nominee list, or the next edition year; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The absence matters in practice, because a supporter who assumes a poll runs for a full month can find the week closed before the class has shared the link.

How a supporter votes in the Student of the Week poll today

The mechanic on the Register's ballot takes a supporter through three quick moves. Open the live poll.fm page, read the short list of Student of the Week nominees, each shown as a name with a high school beside it, click the radio button next to the student you want to back, and press the vote button. The page then reveals the running tally, so the same visit shows both the act of voting and the state of the race.

There is no category menu to work through and no form to fill in beyond the selection itself. The December 2024 ballot, for instance, offered a straight choice among three nominees from two schools, and nothing else appeared on the page. A supporter who arrives after close sees the same layout with the poll marked closed and the final percentages displayed.

Because the series is weekly, the practical skill is timing rather than technique. A vote cast early in the week has the whole window to work on classmates and family; a vote cast near the close has almost none. The Register does not print the weekly open and close times on the ballot, so the workable habit is to vote as soon as the new poll appears and to share the link the same day, while the full window is still ahead of the nominee.

Nomination is a separate step that the newspaper controls: the Register's education desk assembles each week's list, and the poll page itself carries no write-in box. A family that wants a student considered for a future week needs the newspaper's nomination channel, not the ballot.

How this poll sits beside its Iowa neighbours

Iowa has a busy reader-vote scene, and the Register's Student of the Week is unusual within it because the subjects are students and the rhythm is weekly. The large best-of programs in the state run on annual cycles and rank businesses. In Des Moines itself there are two: Best of Des Moines (CITYVIEW), at its own page, and Best of Des Moines (Business Record), at its page. Both ask readers to vote for local companies across many categories once a year.

Outside the metro, Best of Cedar Rapids (The Gazette), covered at its route, and Cedar Rapids CommunityVotes, at its route, serve the eastern side of the state, while Best of the Corridor from the Corridor Business Journal, at its page, spans the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City corridor. The AHBA Parade of Homes, at its page, is an Ames home-building showcase rather than a reader poll in the same sense.

What separates the Student of the Week from all of them is scale and tempo. Each ballot names a handful of high schoolers, runs for about a week, and is decided by school communities mobilising quickly, whereas the business contests run for weeks and reward sustained campaigning. The nominee schools on the December 2024 ballot, Lincoln High School and Adel Desoto Minburn High School, also show the poll reaching suburban districts, not only Des Moines proper.

Strengthening support inside a weekly poll window

A weekly ballot changes how support has to be organised. In the Register's Student of the Week there is no long runway: the poll.fm page opens, the school community has days rather than weeks, and the tally is public the whole time. That favours fast, personal outreach, a message to the class group, the team chat and the family list with the exact ballot link, on the day the poll appears.

The organizer's own rules are thin on the page. The Register prints no statement on the ballot about outside vote help, paid or otherwise, and no per-person limit, so a supporter planning a push has no published line to read against. What is known is the mechanic: every vote is a click on the public ballot, and the tally decides the week exactly as it is displayed.

Because the window is short, timing beats volume. A smaller number of votes arriving early moves the visible percentage for days; the same number arriving in the final hours may land after close. For a fuller treatment of outreach that suits a short weekly student poll, see the votes guide, and for what the organizer's silence on paid votes does and does not mean, the legality page covers the general position.