Learning Network: Our Open Letter Contest Winners

June 26, 2026

Good morning! We’ve crowned seven teen winners of our Open Letter opinion-writing contest, and you’re going to want to read them all. — The Learning Network

“Dear ____”: The powerful results of our Open Letter Contest

Four photos of protesters carrying a banner reading "ICE out now" down a street, a young person holding a phone, a sign that reads "We accept SNAP" and a young person leaning against a bench with a subway going by behind him.

This year’s winners wrote about protests against ICE, social media bans for children, the gutting of SNAP benefits, hostile architecture and more. Clockwise from top left: David Guttenfelder/The New York Times; Hollie Adams/Reuters; Norman Pogson/Alamy; James Estrin/The New York Times

Our third annual Student Open Letters Contest challenged teens around the world to write public-facing letters to people or groups about issues that matter to them.

From 11,185 submissions, our judges — including Times journalists, Learning Network staff and educators from around the U. S. — selected seven winning letters, as well as dozens of runners-up and honorable mentions.

We hope you’ll read them all, and we hope you’ll leave comments for these thoughtful and passionate teens.

Recent Times reporting about education

Student cheating is becoming impossible to detect in an A.I. era
Though this teacher has doubts about A.I., he won a prize using it.
The high school philosophy exam is a rite of passage for French students. It is taken at the exact same time each year around the country by more than a half-million teenagers.
Here’s how these high schoolers prepare for the “Tonys for teenagers.” (And here’s who won.)
In the Opinion section, an education policy consultant writes, “I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.”

We crowned FOUR Summer Reading winners this week!

Madison Square Garden as seen from the highest seats, with blue lasers streaking across the arena.

Shuran Huang for The New York Times

For Week 1 of our 17th Annual Summer Reading Contest, we received 634 teen submissions, and we liked four of them so much we just went ahead and made them all winners.

Click here to watch a video about memes and another about family secrets, and to read a short essay on the Knicks and another on Clavicular, who is, according to the 13-year-old student who wrote about him, “the world’s premier mogger.”

Want the teens you know to join in? They can participate any or every week from now until Aug. 14. Here’s where they can enter this week.

We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to LNfeedback@nytimes.com. More next week.

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