Manhattan Mercury Classroom Champions: How Voting Works & How to Win

Manhattan Mercury's Classroom Champions, entity block

Classroom Champions belongs to the Manhattan Mercury, a Kansas newspaper that runs it through the Second Street platform at themercury.secondstreetapp.com. Two editions are confirmed so far: an initial run in 2024 and a second, Classroom Champions 2025, that opened nominations and voting April 28 and closed December 2, 2025.

Classroom Champions itself never draws a boundary around who can be nominated; the platform listing simply names the ballot and its confirmed dates, alongside an earlier, undated listing at themercury.secondstreetapp.com/Classroom-Champions that carries no separate date range of its own.

Treat the last two rows as open questions, not gaps to fill in from memory. Classroom Champions is only two confirmed editions deep, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle rather than repeating whatever a different Second Street newspaper elsewhere in Kansas happened to publish.

A school ballot, not one of Kansas's business 'best of' polls

Manhattan Mercury runs Classroom Champions on its own Second Street account, separate from the citywide "best of" polls other Kansas publishers run for local businesses. Confusing the two means comparing programs that never actually competed against each other, and it means pointing a school's supporters toward the wrong web address entirely.

Why that separation matters for a Classroom Champions nomination

Searching a generic phrase like "Kansas readers choice" is as likely to surface one of those six business ballots as it is Manhattan Mercury's own Classroom Champions page. themercury.secondstreetapp.com is the address that actually settles where a nominated school or educator stands; nothing routed through a different publisher's ballot counts toward it.

What else runs on Manhattan Mercury's Second Street account

Classroom Champions is not the only promotion Manhattan Mercury runs through its Second Street account. A separate photo gallery, "SNAP SHOTS! Submit your photo to The Mercury," stays open across a long-running window from May 2023 through January 2027, a different format entirely from Classroom Champions' periodic nomination-and-voting ballot.

The same account also carries a rotation of sweepstakes: a "2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes," an "Ultimate Tailgate with Hy-Vee," a "K-State vs. Washington State" giveaway, a "Merle Norman" sweepstakes, and a "2026 Q3 $5,000 Sweepstakes" have each run their own separate entry windows on themercury.secondstreetapp.com. None of them feed into Classroom Champions results, and none of them share its nominate-then-vote structure.

That distinction matters for anyone who lands on the platform through a search rather than a direct link. A visitor who opens one of Manhattan Mercury's sweepstakes pages by mistake is nowhere near Classroom Champions, even though both promotions share the same organizer and the same secondstreetapp.com address.

Building support around two confirmed editions, not a decade of history

Two editions is a brief history to lean on. Rather than waiting on years of past winners that don't exist yet, a nominated Kansas school's best move is working the confirmed window it actually has: April 28 through December 2 in 2025's case, with a third edition expected to follow once Manhattan Mercury posts it.

What moves a two-edition ballot like this is the same thing that would move a much older one: a school's own families showing up more than once instead of a single spike timed to the last possible day. Second Street's own fraud detection doesn't care how new a program is, so a Classroom Champions flag lands just as hard on its second year as it would on a market with a decade behind it. Is buying votes legal explains exactly where that line sits, and buying votes online covers what a compliant assist for a school ballot like Classroom Champions typically involves.