Just about everyone knows how old-fashioned spelling bees work. Ryan Owens, the director of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, says he got a call not long ago about a different kind of bee: a civics bee!
"The National Chamber of Commerce has been working on this for about 3 years now. And they reached out to me about a year-and-a-half ago and said, 'Hey, we've got this thing called the National Civics Bee and we'd love FSU to be the host institution for the state championship. And I jumped all over it!"
Owens says 6th, 7th and 8th grade students all over Florida are involved in the program.
"The local chambers will work with the national chamber to reach out to schools across various communities and they have regional competitions across the state of Florida and of course all the other states in the country. And the winners of those regional ones get sent to their state championship. So that one will be here at FSU on June 30th at 4 o'clock in the Turnbull Conference Center."
That championship, says Owens, is open to everyone and should be an exciting event.
"Students will get a series of multiple choice-type questions up on a big screen. People in the audience will have the ability to play along themselves. So there will be two rounds of those types of questions and then there's a third round, which is more of a question/answer kind of response with the students and the judges sitting at the dais."
The objective, of course, is to advance to the National Civics Bee in Washington, DC this fall. Owens says there are impressive prizes for the winning competitors.
"At the state level, the winner will take home $1,000, which is pretty great. But the winners of the National Civics Bee, the first-place winner gets $100,000, which they can use towards a 529 college plan. And even second and third place get $25,000 and $15,000."
It promises to be a lot of fun. But Owens says there is actually a very serious objective to the whole affair: to encourage greater civics knowledge for everybody.
"From the data, we know that people who have greater civics education are much more politically tolerant, are much less likely to play footsy with political violence. They are much more likely to engage civically and so it's that kind of health that we want to grow in this country today."
2026 Florida Statewide Finals - National Civics Bee® | Institute for Governance & Civics | FSU
