Emely Zarzuela loves to yap.
The 15-year-old’s favorite part of school is socializing. The academic part? Not so much.
Emely, a sophomore at Galax High School in Galax, Va., a small, rural Appalachian town, near the North Carolina border, likes school—“for the most part”—but it has “gotten harder through the years,” she said.
“There are definitely times where I’ll be in a subject, and I’m like, ‘God, please get me out of here,’” said Emely, who immigrated to Virginia from the Dominican Republic when she was around 3 years old.
If it weren’t for Primeros Pasos, Emely might not be as motivated to do well academically, she said.
Primeros Pasos (“first steps” in Spanish) is a mentorship program that pairs Hispanic college students at nearby Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—commonly known as Virginia Tech—with Hispanic high school students from the Galax school district at risk of not graduating or in need of additional support, figuring out their next step after high school.
Primeros Pasos was born out of a need that Elizabeth Stringer-Nunley, the English-learner lead for the district, saw in her more than 20 years as an English-learner educator in the Galax school system.
Her vision is paying off: The district has seen a dramatic decrease in the dropout rate, particularly among English learners, since the program’s inception in 2023.
Galax was once a hot spot for migrant workers from Latin American countries hoping to find employment on farms or in factories, said Stringer-Nunley, who grew up in town and became the district’s first ever teacher dedicated to middle and high school ELs in 2001.
Now, the Hispanic population in Galax, a town of 6,700 residents overall, is more settled. Second and third generations families have grown roots. Few migrants are coming through. The school district has 1,400 students, of which 33% are Hispanic, 40% are economically disadvantaged, and 19% are English learners.
For many of those families, finding a paying job in farming or manufacturing remains a higher priority than a high school diploma—much less a postsecondary credential, Stringer-Nunley said.
That may be part of the reason a disproportionate number of Galax’s English learners drop out, said Stringer-Nunley. In the 2023-24 school year, the district’s EL dropout rate was 29%, compared with 18% for ELs statewide. The overall dropout rate in the district was 5%, compared with 4% statewide.
“It’s very hard to keep them in school after they’re 16, 17 years old,” Stringer-Nunley said, “because there’s some pressure to help support the family financially.”
Before the mentorship program, the district would meet with families of students at risk of dropping out to explain the importance of education and the opportunities available for students who graduate from high school, Stringer-Nunley said. They would try to make sure the students felt connected to the school and were involved in extracurricular activities.
But Stinger-Nunley wondered if she and her colleagues were the right messengers for the families they were trying to reach.
“As many times as I would say, ‘There are so many opportunities,’ [I know] I’m a middle-age, white woman [saying] this to young Hispanic, mostly male students who were having to drop out,” she said.
So when Virginia Tech offered its resources, Stringer-Nunley knew what her students needed: mentors who look and sound like them, who have similar life experiences, and who have made it through high school and on to college.
The strategy “was Elizabeth’s brainchild,” said Galax Superintendent Susan Tilley, who directly oversees Stringer-Nunley’s work. “She is the hero of this program.”
Maria Coady, a professor at North Carolina State University with a focus on multilingual learners and rural communities, said that Stringer-Nunley’s work is “tremendous.”
“What we know is that, especially kids from minoritized backgrounds—it could be racially, linguistically, ethnically—when they have a mentor, and especially when they see someone who looks like them in the university, they see it’s possible for them,” said Coady, who has not studied Galax’s work specifically and based her comments on a reporter’s description of the program.
Rural English learners in middle and high schools usually face challenges that make it harder to stay in school, she said. “They see it as their responsibility to help their families. And school gets harder and harder; it gets more technical in the secondary level, so they have a lot to catch up on.”
Having a mentor who shares their background “makes a big difference,” Coady said. “They can visualize themselves [in college].”
Students need to ‘see people like them’
Becoming a teacher was not on Stringer-Nunley’s radar back when she was a high school student.
She wanted to be an anthropologist. She studied Spanish and sociology in college. She went to Spain as an exchange student and fell in love with its culture and language. In 2000, shortly after graduating from college, she found a job teaching Spanish at Oak Hill Academy, a private school 28 miles southwest of Galax, though she didn’t plan to make education her career.
Back in Galax, the town was starting to see more and more English learners move into the area. The school district created an English-learner teaching position. When Stringer-Nunley found out about the job, she took it. Though she didn’t have a desire to return home, she wanted to keep using her Spanish. It was her newfound love for teaching English to Spanish speakers that brought her back.
“There had not been anyone in this position before,” she said. “They really didn’t know what the position should look like. EL was a whole new thing to Galax.”
Stringer-Nunley did a lot of her own research, as a result. The first few years were a trial-and-error period to figure out what worked.
She then got a degree in education, followed by a master’s as a reading specialist. She built the district’s English-learner program from the ground up.
In 2022, the district created a new position—English-learner lead—and promoted Stringer-Nunley to the role.
“The needs of the students were just so great, and it continued to grow,” Tilley said. She and the school board knew about Stringer-Nunley’s work and “how much additional value she could add to our organization if she had this leadership role.”
Stringer-Nunley, 47, now in her 25th year at Galax, saw how she could use her love for the Spanish language and culture and “be an advocate.”
Now, she says, “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
In 2023, Deirdre Hand was new to her job as the community-engagement specialist for the centers for Rural Education and for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies at Virginia Tech. She was looking for ways to merge both centers’ work when she came across statistics from Virginia’s Office of New Americans that showed Galax had one of the highest percentages of English learners in the state. She knew she had to reach out to the district.
When Hand and Stringer-Nunley connected, Stringer-Nunley talked about how she wanted to lower the dropout rate of her Latino students. Hand suggested a tutoring program, but Stringer-Nunley said the district already had robust academic support.
What students “need to see is people like them who are doing something else, that there are other options, and that they could believe it about themselves,” Hand said, recalling Stringer-Nunley’s words.
And so the mentorship program that would eventually be named Primeros Pasos was born.
Now, the program is in its third cohort of students. All the students who were in the first two cohorts graduated from high school. The district’s English-learner dropout rate in the 2024-25 school year was 7%—a 22-percentage-point decrease from the year prior.
Having a mentor has made high school easier, students say
Stringer-Nunley wanted the mentorship program to focus on English-learner students at risk of not graduating. This could mean students who are failing classes because of their grades or absenteeism, who have behavioral issues, who are transitory and have gaps in their education, whose families might need them to help financially and don’t see the need to finish high school, or who might be living on their own and need additional support.
She handpicks the students and invites them to join the program. The students—usually seniors and juniors, though this year there are a few 9th and 10th graders—fill out an application, a parent-permission form, and a contract acknowledging they must pass their classes to participate. For now, the program is capped at 20 students, mostly because of staffing and cost constraints.
Every year, the mentoring program has a fall kick-off event. The Galax mentees take a field trip to Virginia Tech, an hour and a half north, to meet their mentors. There are icebreakers, campus tours, and an all-you-can-eat lunch at the campus cafeteria.
Once a month, the mentor-mentee pairs meet in person, alternating between mentors traveling to Galax or mentees going to Virginia Tech. The mentors plan career fairs, guest speakers, and even craft projects tied to the program’s goals, such as vision boards—collages of images representing wishes and goals.
In between those in-person meetups, the pairs meet weekly on Zoom during the high school students’ 30-minute “focus” period, a daily block for remediation or enrichment.
The mentors have different topics they work on with their mentees, ranging from school and possible pathways after high school to hobbies and home life.
“High school students just want to be heard, and a lot of people don’t always have time to just listen to them,” Stringer-Nunley said.
For Emely, whose family is usually busy working, having a mentor has been the support system that she’s always needed.
“Before the program, nobody really cared about my grades,” she said. “Having that emotional support—and support in general—has definitely made [high school] easier for me.”
Vilma Gutierrez, 19, was a mentee in the Primeros Pasos program for a year and a half before she graduated last May. She and her family immigrated from Honduras when she was 11 years old. She didn’t know any English when she got to Galax, but she was a highly motivated student and enjoyed school.
As soon as Gutierrez was of working age, though, her family pushed for her to join the workforce, Stringer-Nunley said. That was one of the reasons Stringer-Nunley invited Gutierrez to be part of Primeros Pasos, “to add some extra support,” the educator said.
Gutierrez, for her part, was “really excited” to be part of the program, the student said.
Gutierrez is shy around people she doesn’t know well, but the program helped her make “deep connections,” Gutierrez said. Her mentor explained the difference between community college and a university, and what it was like to go to a four-year university like Virginia Tech. She helped Gutierrez plan her future career.
Gutierrez’s favorite memory with her mentor was when she surprised her by coming to her soccer game. “I was in tears—I was so happy for her to be there,” Gutierrez said.
Now, Gutierrez is studying for her cosmetology license. She has stayed in contact with her former mentor.
“She’s actually one of my best friends,” Gutierrez said. “I still talk to her to this day.”
The district has seen the difference the program has made to English learners’ academic performance and attendance, in part because students have to keep their grades up to keep participating, Stringer-Nunley said. “It’s helped kids get here, and it also helps them be proud of something.”
Programs like Primeros Pasos help “humanize education” for students who struggle with academic motivation, said Coady, the professor from North Carolina State. “It gives them people to connect to.”
Serving as a mentor has helped motivate college students
Stringer-Nunley’s work hasn’t just empowered her high school students. It has also inspired the college students who serve as mentors.
Neiver Morales Perez, a junior at Virginia Tech, is from a rural town on the eastern shore of Virginia. He knows firsthand what it’s like to grow up Latino in a small, isolated community with a huge migrant population.
“The first few months [of college], I remember feeling homesick,” said Morales Perez. “This was a really different environment. Being in a predominantly white institution, sometimes, you feel like your identity is not being represented or that your people are not here.”
When he found out that the centers for Rural Education and for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies were building a mentorship program for a nearby rural school district, he knew he had to join.
When the program was just starting out, it was Hand, the community-engagement specialist for the centers, who put up flyers and interviewed the students who wanted to be mentors. Hand set up training for the students on mentorship and trauma-informed care; Stringer-Nunley briefed them on the context and background of their mentees and what she wanted the program to achieve.
By the second year of the program, Primeros Pasos was a university-recognized student-run organization, and it was the college students setting up the interviews, events, training, and fundraisers. The mentors even planned a Noche de Éxito (“Success Night”) for their mentees, presenting each with grants and scholarships for their postsecondary plans and celebrating them in front of their families.
“Finding [this program] gave me a lot of motivation throughout school. It gave me motivation to continue to value my education, to value my work,” said Morales Perez, the founding president of the Virginia-Tech arm of the Primeros Pasos program, which is run in partnership with the Galax school district.
Stringer-Nunley is ‘easy to follow’
Stringer-Nunley singlehandedly leads the Primeros Pasos program from the district’s side. She invites the students and talks to the families. She’s the point of contact for the mentors. She attends field trips to the Virginia Tech campus and oversees the mentors’ trips to Galax. She ensures students show up for the Zoom calls.
Colleagues, students, and mentors describe Stringer-Nunley as someone who is committed, passionate, positive, student-centered, and very “boots-on-the-ground.”
“I don’t know if Primeros Pasos could function without Miss Stringer,” Morales Perez said.
Those who have worked with Stringer-Nunley in her 25 years serving Galax’s English learners, say she is vital to the district’s Hispanic community more broadly. She knows the families and their needs and advocates for them. She sees their language and culture as an asset, not a barrier. In turn, they trust and respect her.
On top of running the Primeros Pasos program, Stringer-Nunley also leads training for the district’s eight English-learner teachers and plans its annual Hispanic night. She also runs a pair of family-literacy programs, one for college awareness and another for early-elementary parents.
“She leads with passion, but she has the capacity and the expertise that follows,” said Amy Price Azano, a professor of rural education and the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Rural Education. “That’s why she’s easy to follow.”
It can be tough to balance the mentorship program with academic intervention
Running the Primeros Pasos program hasn’t been without its challenges, Stringer-Nunley said.
For one: The Virginia Tech student calendar doesn’t completely line up with Galax’s. The district starts school in mid-August, while the college students begin after Labor Day. By the time they’ve recruited and trained mentors, it’s late September or early October.
“It’s not a deal-breaker, but it is a challenge,” Stringer-Nunley said.
Another hurdle: Many of the high schoolers in the program need the academic support that their daily focus period is intended for. It can be tough to regularly carve out a piece of that time for students to connect with their mentor, Stringer-Nunley said.
In the beginning, she also worried that students would come into the program “kicking and screaming,” she said. “But so far, every year, I have had kids begging to come into the program because they hear of the fun things we do when we’re on campus, and the kids talk about [their mentors].”
This school year, the program’s work comes amid the Trump administration’s K-12 funding cuts and crackdown on immigration. But Stringer-Nunley said the community has been supportive of the program and its Hispanic residents. The Primeros Pasos program also doesn’t rely on any federal funding, so it hasn’t been affected.
The only thing Stringer-Nunley would change, if she could get a do-over: Starting the program sooner.
“There were so many students who could have benefited from this before the program existed,” Stringer-Nunley said.
