For The Of Our First Day Of School Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why this Atlantic City photo ballot exists

The For The Of Our First Day Of School Photo Contest is a community photo vote run by WSJO, a radio station whose audience sits in the Atlantic City, New Jersey market. It belongs to the start of the school year: parents and caregivers submit first day of school photos, the station narrows the submissions down to ten finalists, and the public then decides which photo wins. The page WSJO publishes for it is filed under the categories Community, Contests, Lifestyle, Parenting, Photos and Poll, which is a fair description of the program in six words.

What makes this ballot different from most votes a New Jersey reader encounters is that the finalists are not businesses, restaurants or dentists. They are children's photographs, and the people voting are relatives, classmates' families and neighbors inside the station's listening area. That shapes the whole contest: support travels through family networks and school communities rather than through a chamber of commerce roster, and the emotion of the first-day-of-school moment does a lot of the persuasion on its own.

WSJO runs the ballot on sojo1049.com, its own web property, with no outside balloting service in between, which keeps the mechanic simple. The table below pulls together the essentials before anyone votes.

The dated history for WSJO's school photo vote

The contest has a long and mostly unbroken history. Confirmed editions ran in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, a stretch of nine calendar years containing eight editions, with 2021 the only year in that span without a confirmed run. That run of years marks the program as an annual fixture on WSJO's September schedule, not a promotion staged once, and 2026 is the newest confirmed cycle.

Every edition sits in September, which follows from what the photos celebrate: the first day of school. In the cycle documented on the ballot page, the closing rule was explicit, with the photo that received the most votes by midnight on September 21st winning a party for the winner. That dated close is the only day-level fact the published page carries.

Several details remain unpublished. WSJO has not printed a precise open date for the balloting round, an entry or nomination deadline, a per-supporter vote cap, or any eligibility text on the contest page, so the published page leaves those parts of the program open and only the live ballot settles them. The pattern of past years points to a 2027 edition, but the station has not announced one, and nothing on the published page commits it to any future date beyond the September habit the history shows.

How a supporter votes today on the sojo1049.com ballot

Voting here is about as simple as a public ballot gets. A voter starts at WSJO's own contest page on sojo1049.com, where the heading Vote for the Winner of Our First Day of School Photo Contest sits above the ten finalist photos. The station's published text says it plainly: submissions have been narrowed to ten finalists, and the public's votes determine the winner. There is no nomination round for a voter to navigate on this ballot, because the station performs that narrowing itself before the vote opens.

Nothing in the published page text mentions an account, a login, a registration step or a fee. A reader arrives, reviews the ten finalist photos, selects the one they support and registers the vote. The contest page does not state how often a supporter may vote, whether a single ballot allows several choices or whether repeat visits count, so the instruction block beside the vote control during the live September round is the authority on frequency for that edition.

Timing matters more than technique here. The documented cycle rewarded the photo with the most votes at a midnight close on September 21st, so a supporter who waits past the close date contributes nothing no matter how enthusiastic they are. Reading the live page for this edition's close date before rallying a family network is the single most useful thing a supporter can do.

How this photo vote sits among New Jersey's other ballots

New Jersey has a crowded field of public votes, and most of the programs a reader will find alongside this one are business rankings. The Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice and the Best of Jersey Shore Contest both ask readers to pick favorite local businesses across many categories, and Best of New Jersey does the same at statewide scale. The Bergen & Morris Top Dentists ballot and the Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards serve the northern counties, while the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice narrows to food in one county.

The WSJO photo contest stands apart from all of them on three counts. Its finalists are photographs of children rather than business names, so the vote is emotional rather than commercial. Its host is the organizer's own site, sojo1049.com, instead of a shared balloting platform, which keeps the ballot inside the station's brand. And its window is a single September sprint anchored to the school year, where many readers-choice programs run multi-week seasons across several categories. For a family in the Atlantic City market, it is the one September ballot where a single ten-finalist vote decides everything.

Strengthening support for a finalist in this ballot

Because the finalists here are children's photos, the support that moves the needle looks different from a business campaign. The winning photo in the documented cycle was simply the one with the most votes by midnight on September 21st, so the goal is volume from the people who care about the child: grandparents, aunts and uncles, the class group chat and the neighborhood. A short message with the photo itself and the sojo1049.com link does more than any argument, since a school photo recruits itself.

Two cautions follow from what the organizer has and has not published. WSJO prints no per-supporter vote limit on the page, so supporters should read the instructions beside the vote control in the live round rather than assume a daily pattern carries over from another station's contest. And WSJO offers no published statement on outside help for this ballot, which means the organizer's rules, not anyone's sales pitch, are the only authority on what a vote is worth. Anyone weighing purchased support should start from our award-votes page and from the organizer's own posted rules, and should remember that no service can promise a win in a vote whose tally only WSJO counts.