From the Classroom to the Sea: VSP School Partnerships

Last year we officially partnered with SLEP Valparaíso, Valparaíso's public school system.

A few years ago, Chile changed how it manages public schools, moving them out of municipal control and into regional public agencies called SLEPs, or Servicios Locales de Educación Pública. It works something like a school district in the US. SLEP Valparaíso oversees all 66 public schools in the city.

Through this partnership, VSP's transformational programming, including surf, English classes, and our socioemotional and educational support, now happens every week as an official part of the school day. It's coordinated directly with administrators and educators from each school. Right now, we work with four:

• Escuela Intercultural Laguna Verde (96% IVE-JUNAEB)

• Liceo María Luisa Bombal (94% IVE-JUNAEB)

• Escuela Pacífico (93% IVE-JUNAEB)

• Escuela América (93% IVE-JUNAEB)

IVE stands for Índice de Vulnerabilidad Escolar, or School Vulnerability Index. It's calculated by JUNAEB, the Chilean government agency that runs school aid programs like meals and scholarships. A score of 93% means 93 out of every 100 students at that school are facing some kind of socioeconomic vulnerability, whether that's poverty, unstable housing, or family hardship. As each school's index shows, the kids we work with live in highly vulnerable situations. That's exactly why we chose these schools, and why this work matters so much.

Three of these four schools joined us for the first time in 2025: Escuela Pacífico, Escuela América, and Liceo María Luisa Bombal, our first partnership with a high school. In 2025, VSP reached 532 kids, up from 409 the year before. 128 of them came through our three new school partnerships alone. Meanwhile, our neighborhood programs kept doing what they've always done: showing up every week for the kids who already call VSP home. Together, we ran 429 activities in 2025, up from 260 the year before, and logged 1,313 hours of mentorship, up from roughly 1,008. 

This is a model that can keep growing. Our partnership with SLEP Valparaíso is what opened the door to work directly with kids during their school day, and it gives us a real path to formalize agreements with more of the schools they oversee and bring more at-risk youth into our program. We already have evidence of that demand. Introductory surf clinics are single-day visits, where we bring a school’s students down to the beach for their first time in the water and our team teaches the basics of surfing and ocean safety. They're a much lighter commitment than a full weekly program, and they're often how a school and VSP get to know each other before something deeper takes shape. In 2025, we ran these clinics at 17 schools, reaching 247 kids.

Numbers can only tell you so much, and we would love to show you what all of this means for a child. One of our own graduates put together a video series, De las aulas al mar (From the Classroom to the Sea), to show what this partnership looks like in practice. It follows students from these schools to the beach, with footage of what a surf session actually looks like and interviews where the students talk about their own experience:

• De las aulas al mar | Introduction

• De las aulas al mar | Grow Between Waves 

• De las aulas al mar | Learning Together 

• De las aulas al mar | Waves that Transform

• De las aulas al mar | Fall & Try Again

If these stories move you the way they move us, watch them, share them, and help us bring more kids from the classroom to the sea.