My name is Carol Sobh. I graduated from Rutgers University in 2001 with a B.A in marketing. After graduating I followed my dream of working for a marketing research company and slowly found myself searching for something more meaningful. I decided I wanted to start my own business in retail and successfully did so for 5 years. At one point I had opened a business in the Bronx with the idea that I had found my calling.
As I started to immerse myself into my business I was becoming more and more interested in the lives of the people that I happened to see every day. Many of these people, including single mothers, were struggling to make it with more than one job. As I became closer to these families I found myself fascinated by the children. I would spend hours just conversing with them and found they had so much interest in learning and talking about many things that neither their mothers nor their teachers had time for.
I started reading about what schools were like in the Bronx and many other inner city neighborhoods and slowly came to the realization of the bleak future these kids had within their own communities. So I started looking for struggling schools, closer to home in New Jersey. Upon my research, School 4 was listed as lowest performing schools in New Jersey. Starlet Academy was formed shortly after that as a Nonprofit set out to take kids from grades two and three on educational field trips.
