Dorely Leal-Drago, a beloved Spanish teacher at Pascack Valley High School for the past 20 years, will retire at the end of this school year.
As her time at PV comes to a close, Leal-Drago reflects on her career and the memories that she has made with students and colleagues.
Along with being such a passionate teacher of the Spanish language and culture, Leal-Drago could also be considered one of the most active teachers in the school. In the summer of 2021, she hiked the famous 500-mile “El Camino Francés” trail across Spain and France.
But aside from being physically active, Leal-Drago is immensely involved in school trips, as one of her priorities as a teacher is to expose students to Hispanic culture, like her recent trip to bring her Spanish students to an opera about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
“I have so many good memories from PV, especially from bringing students to Spain. But I also love ending my career taking studentsto the opera about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – that was like the golden piece to end my time here at PV,” Leal-Drago said. “I think I was able to expose my students to something that was very significant in the Hispanic world.”
In fact, Kahlo and Rivera are two figures of Spanish culture that Leal-Drago emphasizes and will always help her remember her career at Pascack Valley.
“I have little decorations of Frida Kahlo,” Leal-Drago said. “Everything throughout my teaching has been about Frida. When I take home my items about her, it’s going to remind me of my career at PV.”
Of all the items Leal-Drago has in her room — of which there are many — the decorations of Kahlo feel like the most sentimental for her. Leal-Drago is known for having just about everything you’d need in her room: weights, clothes, snacks, hair dryers, and a World Cup soccer ball. In fact, during this past year’s back-to-school night, Leal-Drago offered one of the many pairs of shoes she keeps in her filing cabinet to a parent whose shoe began to rip apart.
As much as she enjoys teaching Spanish culture to her students, it’s not the thing she cherishes most about the job. Leal-Drago says she will miss the relationships she gets to build with her students the most.
“I’m not spending my final days at PV thinking about what I’m going to do in the future,” Leal-Drago said. “I’m trying to enjoy time with students — I’m really going to miss the relationship that I have with them. Throughout the years, I’ve met such good people. I’m going to miss that a lot.”
Students could always count on Leal-Drago to be an engaging and passionate teacher, especially when it came to dancing, which is an intrinsic part of her classroom experience. Even if you never had her as a teacher, students certainly noticed her dancing and singing outside of her room between classes.
Though she doesn’t want to look too far in the future, she does want to begin travelling in the fall with her husband to hike in areas in and around Spain, France, and Italy that she has not yet visited.
Leal-Drago’s colleague and PV Spanish Teacher Courtney Rems reflected on her time spent working with her.
“Unfortunately, I never had the privilege to have Señora Leal as a teacher,” Rems said. “However, Señora Leal and I would always reflect on my Spanish teachers, and she would refer to them as ‘damas’ [ladies in Spanish]. They were cultured and caring with high expectations for their students, but treated them with the utmost kindness. What she doesn’t realize is that she has become one of the true ‘damas’ of our World Language department and the school.”
“She expects a lot from her students, but she cares deeply for them and shares her passion for culture, including dancing, with this entire building. She’s leaving behind a truly beautiful legacy and is ‘irremplazable’ [irreplaceable].”
