LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Sofia Bosch was nominated by a family member, Isabel Bosch.

"Three words to describe my sister Sofia are: rooted, radiant, and brilliant. I've watched Sofia her whole life — moving across five countries, attending ten different schools, navigating classrooms in languages that weren't always hers, all while carrying a learning disability nobody caught until her senior year of high school. She didn't just survive those years. She turned them into a superpower and is a fearless believer in cultivating hope that transforms the systems around her," said Isabel.

Today, Sofia is a bilingual special education teacher, reading interventionist, and department head at a Title I middle school in Brooklyn. What she has built there is nothing short of extraordinary. She didn't inherit a program. Instead, she created one from scratch, redesigning individualized, experiential, and project-based learning for the students most systems forget. What started in a single classroom has grown into a schoolwide bilingual special education model serving students from more than 16 countries, with over a dozen trained educators and hundreds of multilingual, neurodiverse learners who now have someone who truly sees them.

"I've seen Sofia stay up past midnight supporting students and creating curricula for her team, advocating for families, designing supports for a student who arrived mid-year speaking two languages and reading in none of them. She does this not because it's required, but because she genuinely cannot imagine doing it any other way. She told me once, 'I see myself in every one of my students.' And she means it," said Isabel.

What makes Sofia a LifeChanger isn't just the hours she puts in. It's the way she's redesigned what's possible. She developed PE SOAR, a whole instructional framework to help other teachers understand multilingual and neurodiverse learners the way she does. She develops curricula in restorative justice, financial literacy, activism, bilingual phonics, and social studies for her team. She presents at national conferences. She was just named New York State's 2026 Bilingual Teacher of the Year. In addition, she built MaMu, an entire AI platform, so that teachers everywhere could access what she's spent years developing in her own classroom.

"Ask any of her students or their families, and they won't talk about frameworks or awards. They'll tell you about her joy for teaching, her genuine care, the way she remembers their interests and birthdays and home language, the call she made to explain an IEP in a way that finally made sense, or the time after school she gave to make sure a kid who had fallen through the cracks for years finally felt like he belonged. Sofia is the reason many students and teachers show up. She is a LifeChanger — not in theory, but every single day in a real Brooklyn classroom," said Isabel.