A team from West Hartford’s King Philip Middle School is off to New Zealand for a literature tournament, and have started their fundraising efforts.

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Four King Philip Middle School students are headed to New Zealand this summer to square off with teams from around the globe in a trivia contest that rewards big readers.

After taking first in a regional competition in late January, team “King Philip 1” won the Kids’ Lit Quiz 2026 USA National Final on Feb. 2, at Sheehan High School in Wallingford, Connecticut. By correctly answering questions about everything from 19th century poets to 1930s cartoons, team members Amy Long, Jillian Forrest, Vera Kozmin, and A.J. Salerno qualified for the 2026 Kids’ Lit World Final, a five-day competition that will be held in New Zealand in early July.

“The kids are so excited. And despite winning the nationals with one of the highest scores the founder has seen, they’re still working really hard to prepare for the world final,” said David St. Germain, library media specialist at King Philip. St. Germain, who will accompany the students to New Zealand, and grade 8 and grade 6 language arts teachers Carissa Teff and Kimberly Harrell, coach the more than 30 students who come together weekly throughout the year to practice for this annual contest. “It is really kid-driven. They like being together, they like quizzing each other on these things. They like strategizing. The point of it is to form this little community of kids who love books.”

The Kids’ Lit Quiz is based in New Zealand. It was created more than three decades ago and is still run by Wayne Mills, a former Auckland University Education Senior Lecturer who wanted to increase readership in kids at an age when it is known to lag. Participants must be between the ages of 10-13.

Students form Kids’ Lit Quiz teams at their schools and study together throughout the year. Regional and national contests are held once a year in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the USA, and winners of each national contest are invited to the world competition.

For the world finals, the Kids’ Lit Quiz covers all student and coach expenses once in-country, but teams are expected to fund their own flights. Which means from now until July, King Philip’s Team 1 will be studying hard to vie for the world title and also fundraising for their plane tickets and various travel expenses. In addition to a variety of upcoming fundraising endeavors, the group has started a GoFundMe drive to help defray costs for families and faculty advisors. To donate, go to https://gofund.me/54d5cde64.

This is the first time a team from King Philip Middle School has won the national final, though crosstown Sedgwick Middle School has participated in the world final four times. King Philip 1 defeated 22 other Connecticut teams to reach the 2026 national final, and edged out its own school’s King Phillip 3 team to win first in the national final. Virginia-based Nysmith school received third. King Philip advanced three of five teams to the national finals this year.

“People are pretty excited about it – it’s a source of pride for all the teachers,” St. Germain said of King Philip’s win. “It just shows how West Hartford supports reading. I think we start a culture of reading in the elementary classrooms, we’ve got a library media specialist in every school in the district. It shows how we value that. This is the outcome of that – our students’ success represents all of our efforts to instill a love of reading.”

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