VISUAL CATEGORIES

Seventeen categories allow students to work on creating photographs, videos, multimedia, illustrations and designs in advance of the February submission deadline. Using a prompt provided below by KSPA, the students create their journalism and then submit it online. Comments from judges are returned to advisers via email after the contest results are final.

• Category V01: Academics Photography
• Category V02: Advertising Design
• Category V03: Digital Illustration (previously, Photo Illustration)
• Category V04: Editorial Cartoon
• Category V05: Headline Writing & Design
• Category V06: Infographic Design
• Category V07: Multimedia Storytelling
• Category V08: News Page Design
• Category V09: Social Media 
• Category V10: Sports Action Photography
• Category V11: Sports Feature Photography
• Category V12: Student Life Photography
• Category V13: Video News (can be a team of up to four)
• Category V14: Video PSA (can be a team of up to four)
• Category V15: Video Sports Promo (can be a team of up to four)
• Category V16: Yearbook Design
• Category V17: Yearbook Theme & Graphics (can be team of up to two)

New in 2025: Entries will be submitted using a new system using Google Forms. This document provides in-depth instructions, including video tutorials.

WRITING CONTESTS

Nine additional contests of writing include categories like feature writing, copyediting and cutline writing. Using notes or prompts provided by KSPA in February, students have a couple of days to craft stories, editorials and cutlines that are judged by local professionals. Students receive feedback through rubrics and notes on their writing.

Note: These contests are subject to KSPA’s policy on Artificial Intelligence.

• Category W1: Copyediting
• Category W2: Sports Writing
• Category W3: Yearbook Copy
• Category W4: Feature Writing
• Category W5: News Writing
• Category W6: Cutline Writing
• Category W7: Editorial Writing
• Category W8: Yearbook Sports Writing
• Category W9: Review Writing

New in 2025: Entries will be submitted using a new system using Google Forms. This document provides in-depth instructions, including video tutorials.

Visual prompts posted: Dec. 4, 2025

Deadline for contest registration: Jan. 16, 2025

Writing prompts posted: Jan. 27, 2025

Visual AND Writing entries due: Jan. 30, 2025 (one deadline for all contests this year)

Results of Regional Contest posted: March 5 or earlier 

Registration deadline:

The deadline for contest registration is Jan. 16, 2025. Check back for more information on how to register.

Entry limit:

A particular student may participate in five total categories, whether individually or as a team.

A school can submit up to two entries in each category, unless the school is using “Wild Card” entries in that category.

Fees & Costs:

The fee for each entry is $12.

• Payment may be made online by credit card at the time of registration.
• For payment by check, please make checks payable to KSPA sent to our address (please alert your bookkeeper of the correct KSPA address:0 :
  • Kansas Scholastic Press Association
    1435 Jayhawk Boulevard
    Stauffer Flint Hall
    Lawrence, KS 66045

No partial refunds can be issued for unused registrations.

Need help organizing these entries?

This Google sheet is not a required step in the registration process, but should help advisers in gathering — whether on paper or digitally — the information needed to organize for the KSPA Regional or State Contest. Advisers do not need to communicate the names of their students upon registration. Students will provide their names upon submission of their entry.

Have questions?

Email the KSPA office administrator, Haylee Hedge, at staff@kspaonline.org

How do the judges evaluate entries?

Students can reference the rubrics to see the qualities that judges usually seek. Here are rubrics and some comments that judges often make. (Please note that some rubrics are still being developed for newly added categories.)

https://www.kspaonline.org/rubrics-for-state-regional-contests/

Number of awards

KSPA urges all judges in all categories and classifications to award 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th place.

However, some judges will decide to award fewer than six places. In the past, some judges have cited these reasons for not awarding three honorable mentions:

• a small number of entries in a specific category
• entries that did not follow instructions
• lack of quality from entries

This circumstance — with fewer than six award winners — is more common in Regional Contests than the State Contest. Advisers should be aware of this possibility. The KSPA staff will follow up with judges to request they submit six award winners unless one of the bullet points above applies.

How are regional groupings created?

After registration is complete in January, KSPA will create Regional Groupings that will arrange schools into sets of four to six schools for the purpose of competition. Please check back in January to see these Regional Groupings.

Starting 2019, KSPA researched how to improve our the Regional contests for you. That year, we introduced a way to make the Regional Contests both more fair and more convenient. And it was a huge success! We know the changes encouraged long-time members to keep competing. And of course, we loved seeing new schools join the fun.

 The KSPA staff will create Regionals with a — more or less — balanced number of schools in each Regional Grouping. Rather than guessing at how many schools will attend a regional, KSPA will make regional groupings after we know how many schools are competing.

 Advisers simply complete registration by the deadline. Using those registrations, KSPA will create regional groupings based on the number of schools that register. For about every seven schools, KSPA will create a regional. So, in 2019, 43 schools competed in 5A/6A Regionals. That created 6 regionals.

We will be sure to publish regional groupings soon after that initial registration deadline. Plus, our digital submission system will automatically slot entries from your school into the correct regional grouping.

Nearby schools will likely be in the same regional. However, we will avoid — as much as possible — clustering high schools from the same school district into the same regional. For instance, schools in the AnyTown School District might be distributed into a few different regional groupings, even though they are geographically close to one another. [/expand]

Policy on contests entries from school districts with academies (approved 2022)

Some Kansas school districts allow students to enroll at their high school and a school district academy, often to learn specialized skills. In those circumstances, for the purposes of state and regional contests KSPA will require:

• Each institution that submits entries must have a KSPA member adviser as a teacher at the school. It is not sufficient to have a membership for only the high school but not the academy – or vice versa.

• If a student participates in a publication, club or curricular class at one institution, the student should enter KSPA contests as a student at that same institution. (For instance, if Pat is editor of the high school yearbook, Pat should enter the contest on behalf of the high school – not the academy.)

• If a student participates in a publication(s), club(s) or curricular class(es) at both institutions, that student may choose which institution to compete for. (For instance, if Sam is a newspaper photographer at the high school, but runs social media at the academy, Sam can choose to submit entries for either the high school or the academy.)

• The KSHSAA classification of the school district academy will be determined by the combined enrollment of all high schools that send students to the academy.

As we continue to work towards creating the best environment for learning and growth for student journalists in Kansas, we’re introducing new measures to safeguard the integrity of KSPA contests from artificial intelligence.

This policy will apply to the Regional and State writing contests. Other policies may be developed in the future.

The use of artificial intelligence is prohibited in all KSPA contests. KSPA’s goals remain the same: encouraging learning, providing feedback and developing journalists through competitions. The use of artificial intelligence by competitors would damage these goals.

To protect the integrity of KSPA contests, we are implementing two new protocols for the 2024 contests.

1. Student and adviser acknowledgment that Artificial Intelligence will not be used
   
2. Adult proctoring/supervision of students while they compete in writing contests
    

To read the full policy, please see the link below.

Visual regional contest entries are due at 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025 

Writing prompt dates

Prompts will be released Monday, Jan. 27 at 7 a.m. Deadline for submitting Writing entries is Thursday, Jan. 30 at 8 p.m. 

Submission and supervision

To compete in the KSPA Writing Contests, all schools must comply with the KSPA Artificial Intelligence Policy. That policy, approved by the KSPA board in 2023, requires students to complete their entire writing contest entry in a proctored location. This proctored location will ensure that students do not have access to artificial intelligence and that they do not use it to create their writing entry. Students will have 65 minutes to write their entry and then will turn it in to a Google Form. An adviser or adult proctor should monitor the time and let students know when the time limit has expired.

We encourage advisers to plan ahead for proctoring times and locations at their school during the KSPA Writing Contest competition window.

Past regional & state prompts

Want a preview of what the Writing Category prompts will be like? Want a classroom activity for your students? Need an emergency lesson plan?

KSPA has a page of prompts from previous state and regional contests for you. We will continue to add to the collection as we search through our archives. 

ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: please notice that some of the rules and formats for the contests have changed (most recently for the News Page Design Contest). Be sure to read all directions for this year’s contest for guidance.

Simply Better

Check out our “Simply Better” page, a showcase of the award-winning entries from previous Regional and State competitions. These examples can be used as classroom examples for students who will compete in State.