photo by: Contributed

Bishop Seabury Academy seniors Lucien Brockhoff, Eva Farmer, Gillian Asher and Aidric Bernd attend the 2026 Kansas Civics Games.

Bishop Seabury Academy won an annual state-wide high school competition designed to promote civic engagement and test students’ knowledge of state, local and national government.

The 2026 Kansas Civics Games recognized three winning teams on Thursday, Oct. 29 for developing solutions to a civic challenge involving artificial intelligence and misinformation. Bishop Seabury Academy won first place, and each member of the team received $1,000 to go towards college-level courses or higher education costs.

The students on Bishop Seabury’s team included seniors Lucien Brockhoff, Eva Farmer, Gillian Asher and Aidric Bernd. The team’s sponsor was Sonja Czarnecki, a history teacher at Bishop Seabury.

Olathe East took second and Fort Scott High School finished in third, according to a press release from the Kansas Press Association, which organized the event.

The participating schools traveled to Topeka with students in grades nine through 12. There were seven teams of four students that attended last week’s competition.

The teams were given one hour to address a fictional scenario in which an AI-generated video falsely appeared to show a mayor announcing that the city’s drinking water was unsafe. In the scenario, thousands of community residents shared the video.

The students worked together to develop response plans to help residents verify information, communicate accurate safety information quickly and protect freedom of speech. All of their plans identified the roles of city government, local news organizations and residents.

“We only had one hour to make the presentation and were super nervous about that, but I think we had an ‘aha moment’ when we were all talking out the prompt that we knew what we had and our argument was strong,” Asher told the Journal-World via email.

“We even had technical difficulties mid-presentation and we still continued on,” Asher said.

The annual event is sponsored by the Kansas Press Association, the Kansas Department of Education and the Kansas Office of Judicial Administration.

“I am proud of us,” Asher said. “It’s the first time any of us had ever competed, but we handled it with grace and made the best of it.”