Classroom Champions 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Classroom Champions 2025 is and who runs it

Classroom Champions 2025 is a readers-choice ballot operated by the Manhattan Mercury, the daily newspaper of Manhattan, Kansas. The paper hosts its promotions on Second Street, the balloting platform behind themercury.secondstreetapp.com, and the program belongs to the best-of vertical: readers weigh in and the totals decide who is recognized. That puts it in a different lane from everything else on the Mercury's Second Street account, where the paper also runs photo submissions and giveaway drawings that are not decided by public vote.

The contrast with the rest of Kansas matters here. Best of Johnson County, Best of Lawrence, Best of Wichita and CommunityVotes Topeka each answer to a different publisher in a different market, and this page covers the Mercury's own program rather than any of those. The program name in its most recent form was Classroom Champions 2025, and the publisher appears in platform listings as the Manhattan Mercury, sometimes shortened to The Mercury.

The table below gathers the basics. Everything stated there comes from the ballot listing itself, and anything the listing does not print is left as a gap rather than filled by guesswork. If you are weighing Manhattan's ballot against programs in Lawrence or Topeka, hold on to the publisher distinction, because rules and dates are set per program even when the platform is shared.

Facts at a glance

The dated record: confirmed editions and the 2025 window

The program has confirmed runs in 2024 and 2025 on Second Street's listing for themercury.secondstreetapp.com. The 2025 ballot followed an initial 2024 edition, and its window ran from April 28 through December 2, 2025, on a nomination-and-voting ballot. The recurrence pattern is annual, which makes a 2026 edition the next expected run.

What the listing does not carry is equally concrete. The Mercury has printed no category roster for the ballot, and the listing holds no supporter rules on vote limits or eligibility; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

A couple of practical consequences follow from the dates. A window stretching from late April into December gave supporters a long runway in 2025, but the closing date, December 2, is what decided the outcome, so late mobilization near that close carried most of the weight. Because the ballot combined nomination with voting, getting a nominee onto the page mattered before any vote total could build at all.

Beyond the pattern, nothing about a 2026 edition is fixed. The Mercury's own pages are where a new window, a fresh category list and any rule changes will surface, and the safest habit is to check there rather than assuming the 2025 dates recur unchanged. Where the paper does publish a change, that publication, not this summary, governs.

How a supporter votes on the Classroom Champions ballot

Supporters act on the ballot itself, which Second Street serves at the program's own address. The format is a nomination-and-voting ballot, so the sequence begins with nominating, or locating, a nominee, and continues with casting votes for the entries a reader wants to back. Second Street ballots walk a visitor through the categories the paper has enabled for the current run, and the live page is the authority on what those categories are in any edition.

A practical walkthrough looks like this. Open the ballot at its Second Street address. Read the categories and nominee listings the page presents. Nominate an entry that is missing, or select the existing listing for the one you back. Submit the vote through the on-page controls and confirm the platform's receipt. Come back as many times as the ballot permits until the window closes.

Two cautions apply. The 2025 window has closed, so a visit today lands on a closed ballot rather than a live competition, and any new edition will sit at whatever address the Mercury publishes for it, which may differ from the 2025 URL. The paper has also published no frequency rule for this ballot, so the live page's instructions govern returns. For supporters thinking about visibility beyond a personal circle, our guide on getting more votes online covers tactics that fit this kind of readers-choice ballot, and the organizer's terms always sit above any tactic a supporter might try.

How this ballot sits beside its Kansas neighbours

Kansas readers comparing public-vote programs have several siblings to set against this ballot: Best of Johnson County, Best of KC (Kansas City Magazine), Best of Lawrence, Best of Wichita, CommunityVotes Overland Park and CommunityVotes Topeka. Each is a best-of style program, and each answers to its own publisher. Classroom Champions differs in being tied to a single newspaper's hometown, Manhattan, and in carrying a school-flavored name, though what the ballot's categories actually honor is something the Mercury has not listed in print.

Practically speaking, the difference that matters to a supporter is the address. The Manhattan ballot lives on themercury.secondstreetapp.com, while the sibling programs sit on their own routes and publishers, linked below. A vote cast in the Lawrence program does nothing for a Manhattan nominee, and the reverse holds as well; totals do not travel between programs, and neither do rules.

If you are deciding where effort should go, the comparison that matters is local: who reads the Mercury, who the nominees are, and when the next window opens. Readers in other Kansas markets should work from the page for their own program rather than treating the Manhattan ballot as a stand-in, because dates, categories and eligibility are set per program by each publisher, not per state. The links below take you to each sibling page in turn.

Strengthening support for a nominee on this ballot

Support in this program comes down to the ballot's own mechanic: getting a nominee named, then bringing votes in before the window closes. In 2025 that runway ran to December 2, and the annual pattern suggests a similar span in future editions, though the Mercury has confirmed nothing past 2025. The paper has printed no rules on outside help for this ballot, so the safe reading is that ordinary supporter outreach is what the format is built for, and anything beyond it should wait until the live rules say otherwise. Our pricing page and our votes guide describe the service side of that question for readers who want the detail, but for this ballot the opening step is always the organizer's page, since the Mercury decides what counts and its live rules govern every edition.