Classroom on the Sand with Belen Jesuit Preparatory School

Overview

On February 26th, 2025, the International SeaKeepers Society hosted a Classroom on the Sand experience with 30 students and 3 chaperones of Belen Jesuit Preparatory School at Historic Virginia Key Beach Park in Miami. We met the students and began our day with a site discussion about the park before leading a beach cleanup, where after just two hours of work our awesome team of students and chaperones removed more than one hundred total pounds of trash. To add to the fun, we had the students split into two groups to see which of the two would be able to remove the most trash. Thanks to some strange and heavy items including an abandoned electrical fan, Team 2 of students managed to win the competition by removing 55 out of the 100 total pounds we managed to collect. Our students then took a break for lunch as well as participated in a discussion on what they had found, before being visited by Luis of the Park’s Educational Team who spoke to the students on the history of the park and its unique beaches. Following their break, our students participated in a final activity called Sink or Float, where our Community Engagement Associate, Lillian, led an interactive game where the students learned of the seven major types of plastics and made guesses as to whether each one would sink or float in seawater, as well as which outcome is more dangerous a result for the local ecosystems. We give a huge thanks to the students of Belen Jesuit for their hard work, to Luis as well as Historic Virginia Key Beach Park for hosting us and look forward to hopefully seeing some of the students at future SeaKeepers events and cleanups!