The Clarion-Ledger Jackson Metro Student of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Jackson Metro Student of the Week is and who runs it

The Clarion-Ledger Jackson Metro Student of the Week is a recurring public-vote recognition program run by The Clarion-Ledger, the daily newspaper serving Jackson and the surrounding metro area of Mississippi. Its subject is high school achievement: each week during the school year the publisher spotlights outstanding local students and asks readers to decide who takes the weekly title. The vertical is best-of style recognition, but the honoree is a person rather than a business.

Nominations flow through a form the publisher operates, which asks for the nominator's own email address alongside the student's details. Once a weekly slate is set, the vote itself moves to Crowdsignal, the polling platform reached through poll.fm links. The 2025 ballot lived at poll.fm/16194028.

The table below collects the essentials for a supporter or a nominee's family.

Because the program honors minors, this page describes candidates by school rather than by name. The 2025 slate drew from Canton High School, JPS-Tougaloo Early College High School, Forest Hill High School and Pearl High School, a spread that shows the metro-wide reach of the nomination pool.

The dated history: editions, windows and what is not published

Confirmed editions of the program ran in 2023, 2024 and 2025. The publisher frames the feature as weekly, with each school-year week producing its own ballot, its own slate and its own closing time. That means the edition years mark the series continuing rather than counting standalone contests.

The cycle documented in full is the 2025 ballot that ran from October 26 to November 1. Its Crowdsignal page is now marked closed, and the final tally showed the leading candidate at 67 percent with 22,297 votes against 31 percent and 10,356 votes for the runner-up. Those totals make this a genuinely high-turnout poll for a metro student recognition feature.

The ballot page prints no grouping of nominees and no category list; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The publisher also does not state on the poll itself when the next weekly window opens, since each ballot carries only its own dates.

For planning purposes, the pattern a nominee can rely on is the school-year rhythm: ballots appeared across 2023, 2024 and 2025, and the 2025 example fell in late October. Anything beyond that, including when the next slate opens and closes, belongs to the next ballot page rather than to any past ballot.

How a supporter votes on the live ballot

Casting a ballot takes under a minute. The supporter follows the current poll.fm link, reads the slate of nominated students, selects a candidate and submits. Nothing sits between the reader and the count: no signup, no fee, and the Crowdsignal page loads the same way on a phone or a desktop.

The rule that shapes everything else is the publisher's stated voting frequency: a supporter can submit a vote once every hour, per device. That sentence, printed with the ballot, turns the weekly race into a rhythm of return visits. A family with three devices can, in principle, add three votes per hour until the poll closes, which is why late-week tallies in this program move quickly.

The practical sequence looks like this: find the current Clarion-Ledger student of the week article, follow its poll link, cast the vote, then come back after each hour has passed on each device you control. The ballot closes on the date printed in that week's headline, and once closed it displays the final percentages instead of the voting buttons.

Because each weekly ballot is a fresh Crowdsignal poll, an old link eventually shows a closed poll rather than the current slate. Supporters who want to keep voting week after week should follow the publisher's newest article rather than bookmarking a single poll.fm address.

Where this ballot sits among Mississippi public-vote programs

Mississippi readers meet this ballot alongside a family of larger public-vote programs, most of them business-facing rather than student-facing. The closest sibling by publisher is Best of the Best Jackson, The Clarion-Ledger's own citywide best-of contest. The same publisher's student of the week and its best-of program answer different questions: weekly individual recognition versus an annual ranking of local businesses.

Statewide and regional neighbours include Best of Mississippi, Best of Coastal Mississippi, Best of Oxford run by the Oxford Eagle, the Daily Journal Readers Choice in Tupelo, and Best of Panola County from The Panolian. Every one of those is run by a separate publisher, with categories and a calendar of its own.

What separates the student of the week from all of them is cadence and subject. It is the only program in this set that crowns a high school student, and the only one that resets weekly during the school year. Its ballots also live on Crowdsignal's poll.fm hosting, while many best-of programs in the state run on their own contest platforms. For a nominee's family, that means the competitive window is short, the hourly rule matters more than in a month-long ballot, and the audience is the metro community rather than the whole state.

Strengthening support in a weekly student poll

A weekly ballot rewards organization over intensity. Because the publisher's rule allows a vote once every hour, per device, the winning approach is a schedule: ask supporters to vote at the same hour daily, and to use every device in the household. A student with twenty committed adults voting hourly will outpace a larger crowd that votes once and forgets.

The organizer publishes no special pathway for outside help, so anything beyond organic sharing should be weighed against that hourly, per-device rule and the short weekly window. Families weighing paid support can read how award votes work before deciding, and the disclaimer below applies in full: nothing any vote service sells can promise a win in a poll decided by a live public tally.

Timing matters too. The 2025 ballot closed with a 67 percent to 31 percent split, a gap that wide is hard to close in the final hours. Momentum built early in the weekly window, when the slate is fresh on the publisher's site, is worth more than a late surge.