A Bellefonte Area School District fourth-grader is hoping to become “America’s Favorite Student.”
Kieran Long, a 10-year-old student at Marion-Walker Elementary School, is currently in first place in his group for the competition presented by Bill Nye the Science Guy and benefiting the nonprofit Planetary Society. Voting for the group phase ends at 10 p.m. EDT Thursday, April 23, with the winners of each group advancing to the national contest’s quarterfinals.
You can cast your vote for Kieran at americasfavstudent.org/2026/kieran-10.
At the end of the competition, the student picked as America’s Favorite will win $20,000, be featured in Reader’s Digest and get a trip to Pasadena, California to tour The Planetary Society with Bill Nye himself. Founded by Carl Sagan, The Planetary Society is the world’s largest nonprofit space organization.
Kieran has ADHD and “has to work harder than most at a lot of the things we find easier that involve executive functioning skills, such as impulse control, working memory and self-regulation,” his mother, Robyn Long, wrote in an email.
He is gifted, however, with a high intelligence that is sometimes masked by an inability to focus.
“Despite this, he constantly beats the odds with his fighting spirit,” Robyn Long said.
Calling neurodivergence his superpower, Long said her son “is a math wizard and reads through books at lightning speed.” He is a member of Marion-Walker Elementary’s Reading Competition Team and is in the Bellefonte school district’s gifted program, where he is encouraged to “think outside the box,” a skill at which he excels.
He also has a giving spirit. Kieran raised more than $1,000 for his school’s Jump Rope for Heart fundraiser.
“I don’t think he understands the full impact of that, but he wanted to do it, and he actually raised over a thousand dollars for that for the American Heart Association,” Robyn Long said. “For fundraisers, usually they have an incentive to get prizes, but that really didn’t have an incentive except to get like a jump rope and things like that.”
And though the America’s Favorite Student prize money is intended to further the winner’s education, Kieran has said he would want to donate it to children’s hospitals.
“To him, [the competition] is just exciting,” Robyn Long said. “He is more excited, I think, about meeting Bill Nye than anything.”
The competition has been a meaningful experience for Kieran and his family, including the community support they’ve received from teachers, friends and co-workers. It’s the same kind of support that has helped Kieran blossom as a student who loves going to school.
Robyn Long, a U.S. Air Force veteran and front desk coordinator a RE/MAX Centre Realty, and her husband, Mike Long, a teacher at Penns Valley Junior/Senior High, moved to Centre County from Maryland in large part because of the schools. The support they found in the schools, and in the community, has been even greater than they hoped.
“I’ve been so impressed with the the school system in general, but the community has been so great, too,” Robyn Long said. “We’ve made some really great friends here, and then my job and the people I’ve met there, they have been awesome… They’re all about helping him. And just in general, the teachers are great. They feel like that small town, community family that wants to make him the best person they can.”
That community has helped Kieran advance further in the America’s Favorite Student competition than the Longs imagined when Robyn first saw a post about it on Facebook and asked him if he’d like to enter.
Kieran, meanwhile, hopes that his participation can help to inspire others.
“We just appreciate people reading about him and his story,” Robyn Long said. “The one thing he wanted to tell people is even if you have ADHD, you can do amazing things.”
