WSJO First Day of School Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

Ten finalists, one radio station, one confirmed deadline: midnight, September 21st

The most useful thing to know before anything else: WSJO's First Day of School Photo Contest isn't an open call. The station narrows every year's submissions down to 10 finalists first, then opens public voting on that shortlist at sojo1049.com. A reader arriving expecting an open photo-upload contest is looking at the wrong stage of the process.

An earlier version of the page set the close in plain terms: "the photo that receives the most votes by midnight on September 21st will win." The prize line names a restaurant, "a party for 10" at a place the text calls "Chick-fi" before the quoted text cuts off; the exact name isn't confirmed past that fragment.

Past the confirmed 10-finalist format and the historical close date above, the live sojo1049.com page, not this guide, is the actual source a parent should rely on.

A family photo contest, not a business readers-choice ballot

New Jersey runs several much larger best-of ballots that a search engine might surface right alongside this one: Best of New Jersey, Best of Jersey Shore, and Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice among them. Those are business popularity contests, restaurants, shops, service providers, competing across dozens of categories.

WSJO's contest is a different shape entirely. The site itself files it under tags reading Community, Contests, Lifestyle, Parenting, Photos, and Poll, not under any business or local-award taxonomy. That's the station's own filing, and it lines up with the actual format: parents submit a photo of a child's first day of school, WSJO picks 10 finalists, and the public votes for a favorite. There's no storefront, no service category, no business name on the ballot at all.

Why that distinction matters for anyone landing here by accident

A business owner searching for New Jersey vote contests general enough to land on this page should look instead at Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards or one of the other business-focused programs listed above. This page is specifically about a family photo popularity vote with a fixed 10-finalist field, run by one radio station.

The ballot itself runs one public stage, not several. WSJO narrows submissions to ten finalists before the page ever opens for votes, so a supporter arriving today finds no separate entry form and no earlier nomination round to track, unlike the multi-stage format Best of New Jersey runs across its many business categories with open nominations first and a separate voting round after. Here, a supporter can only choose among the ten photos WSJO already selected; there is nothing left to submit and no additional category to browse.

Worth saying plainly: a shortlist of 10 is a small field. A photo doesn't need to out-mobilize an entire county to matter here the way a citywide best-of category does. It needs to out-mobilize nine other families, which changes the math of what "building support" even means for a contest this size. And because WSJO runs the whole thing on its own domain rather than through a syndicated contest platform, there's no separate platform-wide promotional-round schedule to track either; nothing on sojo1049.com points to such a promotion for this market. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle whether that ever changes.

What a finalist's family can do before midnight closes the window

With a confirmed 10-finalist field and a historical close of midnight, most years around September 21st, the practical move for a finalist's family is simple: share the exact sojo1049.com link with real friends and relatives while the vote is open, not wait for a wider write-up that a small station contest like this rarely gets.

What holds up regardless of how the current cycle's rules read: real votes from real people, asked plainly and more than once during the open window. A field this small makes a scripted vote pattern stand out fast, and a family that gets flagged loses the finalist spot outright, not just the extra votes.

Until WSJO actually announces a winner, "finalist" is the accurate word for a family's status, not "winner." For the mechanics that apply even where a program's own rules are this thin, a family weighing outside help should start with is buying votes legal, then move to how online contest votes work. Award vote campaign planning covers the broader mechanics of a public-vote format like this one.