For the 18th year in a row, the Lawrence Journal World announced their Academic All Stars. This program highlights some of the highest achieving high school seniors from Lawrence and surrounding areas.

Among these 26 individuals were Free State seniors Jack Ziegler and Sophie Westbrook. Both Ziegler and Westbrook have stood out among their peers as impressive students.

“I was honored to be chosen because I thought there were a lot of other people in my class who were just as, if not more, deserving,” Ziegler said. “So I was pretty happy to be up there.”

By earning this title Ziegler and Westbrook both received a $500 scholarship from the Lawrence Journal world.

Westbrook is proud of her accomplishment, but questions how one measures success in high school.

“You don’t get to quantify what being in high school meant like that,” Westbrook said. “You don’t get to just select somebody, and so there’s the element of randomness to it, but I do think it’s connected to having worked hard in high school; it’s just not a formulaic as they’d like it to be.”

Both Ziegler and Westbrook were proud to receive this honor and plan on bringing this caliber of success with them to college. Ziegler will be attending the University of Kansas and plans on studying engineering and economics. Westbrook will be attending Harvard University where she will study environmental science.