Meet Our Educational Consulting Team

Judi Robinovitz is a Certified Educational Planner with more than 30 years of experience in education. Specializing in educational counseling, she is the author of numerous books, articles, and software on test preparation and college planning. Robinovitz has been a featured speaker at national educational conferences and schools. To keep pace with current educational trends, Robinovitz continually travels across America to assess colleges, boarding schools, and emotional growth programs.

During her tenure at Educational Testing Service, Robinovitz served as technical liaison to the College Board, the Law School Admission Council, and the Graduate Record Examination Board. She spearheaded the College Board's SAT prep software and made major contributions to their test preparation books. Frequently taking the SAT, Robinovitz scored a perfect 800 on all three sections of the SAT.

Consulting to two private schools in Boca Raton, Yeshiva High School and Donna Klein Jewish Academy, Robinovitz created their college guidance programs and served as Director of College Guidance to the first five graduating classes of each school.

As an active member of several international organizations – Independent Educational Consultants Association, Higher Education Consultants Association, National Association for College Admission Counseling, National Association of Advisors for the Health Professions, Secondary School Admission Test Board – Robinovitz is part of a professional network of admission directors, educators, clinicians, and other educational consultants. 

She is also a member of the National Learning Disabilities Association and the Orton Dyslexia Society.

Robinovitz studied at Harvard University, Rutgers University, and the University of Connecticut. She holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, both with highest honors. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

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Jason Robinovitz, the Chief Operating Officer of all JRA Educational Consulting Learning Centers, oversees each Center’s day-to-day operations, ensuring the delivery of top quality educational support and guidance services to client families. As team leader for our staff of more than 100 educators, Jason is in charge of strategic decision-making, including best practice policies, customer service, staffing, training, marketing, systems, and technology.

Jason is also involved in educational consulting services for college, boarding school, and law school clients. Meeting with students, Jason specializes in directing pre-law and future law-school students toward the extracurricular activities that will help position them for success. Skillfully guiding them through the application and essay process, Jason helps students distinguish themselves from the rest of the applicant pool. He also works with families seeking therapeutic placements for their children, identifying the “best fit” schools and programs for them and interfacing with these schools and programs to ensure successful placements.

As an active member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the Secondary School Admission Test Board, Robinovitz is part of a professional network of admission directors, educators, psychologists and other educational consultants.

Jason graduated from the University of Denver with a BSBA in Finance and concentrations in Real Estate and Leadership. Three years later, he graduated from Emory University School of Law with a concentration in business and corporate law. Jason practiced medical malpractice law for five years before joining JRA Educational Consulting. He is a member of the Florida Bar.

Jason is the son of Judi Robinovitz, founding owner of JRA Educational Consulting Learning Centers.

Barry Mallis served on the executive staff at Score At The Top for over eleven years until his semi-retirement in 2016. A graduate of Oberlin and recipient of a Master’s degree from Middlebury, he brought to us years of independent school teaching experience in English, modern languages (Spanish, French and Russian), and theatre. The recipient of a N.A.I.S. Braitmayer Foundation Fellowship, he studied mime and movement with Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and then used that experience to prepare a curriculum for teaching Mime at the secondary school level.

In addition to his work with students, Barry facilitated strategic business planning workshops with top management teams of Fortune 500 companies in the United States, Mexico, and Germany. His eclectic experience includes membership on the ski patrol of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid; service as interpreter for a group of U.S. Rotarians visiting northwest Russian in 1998; high-school varsity soccer coaching (he held a US Soccer Federation “C” coaching license); and certification as a referee instructor and assessor for USSF. His poetry has been published in the Northern New England Review, and his work on strategic management theory appeared in Center For Quality of Management Journal. Barry completed three marathon road races.

Beginning his teaching career in 1968 in New England, Barry eventually joined Score At The Top in 2004, providing in-service programs about SAT testing to teachers in Palm Beach and Broward County public and private schools. In addition, he offered “college night” workshops to parents and students in the region’s public and private institutions. For ten years he was an SAT essay scorer for the College Board, training Score At The Top test-prep tutors to successfully prepare students for the essay and writing/English sections of the SAT and ACT. During the last half of 2015, he worked closely with Judi and others to develop Score’s completely revamped SAT strategy workbook, for which he developed the strategies and wrote the chapters about the redesigned SAT’s reading, writing and language, and essay sections. Travelling farther afield, Barry has led SAT workshops at boarding schools in the Eastern United States and in private schools in South Florida. He has lent an important hand to students preparing their applications and essays for boarding school, college, graduate, law, medical/dental, and business school admission, support he continues to provide (whence the semi-retired status!).

His work with children and adults throughout his career has been marked by dynamism, enthusiasm, and a breadth of knowledge and experience drawn from Singapore to the Amazon basin to Israel.

Barry and his wife Melanie live in the Red Rock Country of Sedona, Arizona, with their pug, Daphne. Their next pug, Yavapai (Pai for short) is probably not far behind.

Barbara Leventhal brings to our educational consulting practice more than 30 years of experience as a teacher, administrator, and college counselor. “All parents take great pride in the special qualities of their children. My role is to define those qualities and channel them in unique ways that tell a compelling story for college admission.”

Many parents know Barbara as the guru behind student projects. Her ideas inspire students to create original projects based on their interests. Fully engaged with her protegées, she then guides them through to project implementation. Some have created projects that drew thousands of dollars in donations; others have written and published Amazon best-selling books. Dream Dorm Decorators, started by one of Barbara’s students − and expanded to thirty more − furnished ten dorm rooms for Best Foot Forward’s foster kids. Barbara also planted the seeds for Boca Buckets, a hurricane cleanup kit, which her students gifted to families at Habitat for Humanity. Yet another of her students created bookfitclub.com to help libraries damaged after Hurricane Irma; students collected new and gently used children’s books and donated them to public libraries. Another student created Long Lake Cares to unite his neighbors through a holiday gift drive for underprivileged kids. Barbara has also mentored students with bilingual projects, one of which included a Spanish/English cookbook to benefit Boca Helping Hands. Community walkathons, baseball shirts for Best Foot Forward, holiday parties at Florence Fuller Child Development Center – the list goes on an on! Barbara encourages student leadership projects to address pressing global or local issues.

She enjoys the creative process inherent in working one-on-one, helping each student set goals, select summer programs that demonstrate intellectual curiosity and passion, and create unique personal projects that leave a legacy of community involvement.

“By getting to know each student personally, I’m able to recommend the best high-school class selections and optimal test-prep schedule, to develop college lists that match needs and interests, and to help students figure out how to make their applications stand out from those of other applicants,” Leventhal says.

Although Barbara Leventhal never set out to be a college admissions coach, her ultimate vocation came from a progression of life events that only look linear in the rearview mirror. Her career began as a classroom teacher in middle and high school, where she taught English, social studies, and public speaking, and coached girls’ softball and cheerleading. After seven years, Barb moved from the classroom to administration, serving as director of several middle schools: Miami Country Day, Cushman, Carrollton, and Doctor’s Charter High School, all in Miami. At Cushman, serving as Director of Admissions, she pioneered the first NPR on-air radio campaign to attract parents to the new middle school. To her work credits add Director of the Huntington Learning Center in Coral Gables, and both Program Director and Membership Director at the Michael Ann Russell JCC in North Miami Beach where she won the JWB award for Excellence in Communications and was awarded a generous grant for her special needs after-school program, Special Playtime.

Barb moved to Boca Raton in 2005 and opened her own office specializing in organization and study skills for middle- and high-school students. In doing so, she shared her knack for supporting classroom teachers by using a multimodal approach to reteach or explain concepts that students had not mastered. Her success resulted in requests from parents for help with their children’s college essays. By 2014, she was into college consulting on a full-time basis.

As an educational consultant, reading specialist, teacher, administrator, parent, and grandparent, Barbara Leventhal knows what it’s like to experience the stress and frustration at every step in the education process. Her empathy for her students makes things easier for both them and their parents.

Barbara earned her BS in Education from the University of Virginia and her MS in Reading from Barry University. She is a Wilson trained reading specialist, with experience in diagnosis and remediation of language based reading disorders for  students with Dyslexia and other reading difficulties. She serves the community as a Block Captain for the American Heart Association, and as a member of the Board of Trustees at Temple Beth El of Boca where she is VP of Education. She is a professional member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA) and the Small Boarding Schools Association (SBSA).

Since 2013, Kathy Hart has been an invaluable asset to our educational team at Score At The Top Learning Center and School in Palm Beach Gardens, first serving as an expert teacher and tutor specializing in high school English and test preparation for the ACT and SAT. In her vital role as educational consultant, Kathy guides students through the various aspects of the college planning and application process, from consulting on high school course selection and extracurricular activities to preparing students for effective college visits and interviews. That inspirational guidance takes her students through the more subjective elements of the application process, too: developing creative essay ideas, drafting essays, and improving student writing. The end product of the collaboration: applications and essays that make her students stand out! She also regularly attends conferences and visits colleges to stay abreast of the most recent admissions trends.

Originally from New England, Kathy loves all things Boston. She graduated with honors from Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA, with a BA in Spanish and an interdisciplinary concentration in Middle Eastern Studies, enriching her education at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain. After a stint teaching Spanish at Canterbury School in Connecticut, Kathy spent the following decade moving around the country in support of her husband’s Air Force career, all while raising their two daughters.

Happily settled in Jupiter, FL, she completed her Master’s in Creative Writing at Antioch University Midwest. At Score At The Top, she loves the small classroom environment where she effectively supports her students’ unique educational needs. Her interests include writing, travel, fitness, and cooking.

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Marcy Salenieks comes to us with more than twenty years' experience working with children, families, and other clinical professionals. She graduated with her Masters in Social Work from Barry University in Miami, spent her early professional years doing family therapy with multi-problem families in upstate New York, then practiced psychotherapy with Jewish Family Services both in Richmond, Virginia, and Miami. She joined Dr. Gary Magid, a Hollywood, Florida, psychiatrist in his private practice, where she remained for twelve years while raising her own family. When Dr. Magid retired, Marcy took a brief sabbatical from her practice to pursue her long-held dream of becoming a children's fiction writer. One result is a middle-grade text currently under consideration for publication. Creativity has always been a part of Marcy's personality and a hallmark of the inventive energy that she brings to Score At The Top.

Marcy now channels her strong clinical skills into the field of therapeutic educational consulting. Her passion stems from her family crisis four years ago, when she made the difficult decision to send her oldest son, then fourteen, to a wilderness therapy program in Utah, followed by eighteen months in a therapeutic boarding school in Idaho. Collaborating with her son’s educational consultant, and using her expert clinical training to insure the best-fit placements for him, Marcy was inspired to blend her professional background and personal experience. Working directly with Judi and Jason Robinovitz to identify appropriate therapeutic placements for families faced with this difficult decision, Marcy has the clinical insight and ability to emphasize placement criteria that are invaluable comforts to our families.

In addition to her role as a therapeutic educational consultant, Marcy also serves on the Best Practices Committee for NATSAP (National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs). As the only educational consultant on the committee, Marcy brings a unique perspective to the table and further assists programs in developing the very best practices for improvement and quality assurance.

When she is not assisting families with their special needs, traveling to therapeutic schools and programs, and connecting with other clinical professionals in the community, she is mom to three boys, the oldest of whom is currently hard at work in college. In addition to her creative writing, Marcy enjoys doing yoga, traveling, cooking, and perfecting her Italian.

As personal assistant to Judi Robinovitz, Leslie brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to her position at Score At The Top. Raised in New York City, she attended Boston University and earned her BS in Communications with a specialty in Public Relations. Leslie worked in the entertainment industry as a publicist for the music business prior to becoming an executive in her family's business, Beverly Storage Co/ArtPack International, specialists in international logistics. Her company's clientele included four U.S. Presidents, six Governors and countless celebrities. In 1997, Leslie relocated with her husband & daughter to Boca Raton, where she worked as assistant librarian for the American Heritage School of Boca/Delray.

As a former client who successfully used the college-planning, SAT-prep, and academic-support services available at Score At The Top Learning Center for her daughter, Leslie brings a unique perspective to her position. This, combined with her knowledge of the educational landscape and her ability to engage clients, has made her a great asset. Often Leslie is the first contact clients have with Score At The Top, and they have found her to be a warm, welcoming and professional presence, helping them to understand the benefits of relying on Score At The Top for all of their children’s academic needs.

Ellen Valladares is an award-winning author who has always had a love for writing, storytelling, and words. A native Floridian, she grew up in St. Petersburg and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Florida. She has been writing professionally for over 30 years and has worked as an editor, public relations professional, freelance writer, and college essay coach. Her books include Crossing the Line, a young adult novel published by Wido Publishing, and Jonathan’s Journey to Mount Miapu, a middle grade novel. She also recently co-wrote and published a children’s book, entitled Filbert the Lonely Flamingo, with her brother, Steve Wolfson.

 

Valladares first discovered a passion for helping students with their essays when her oldest son was applying to college in 2014. That’s also when she first met Judi Robinovitz, who was invaluable in helping the family navigate what seemed like an overwhelming process at the time. As a writer, Valladares naturally enjoyed helping her son with the essays and soon found herself assisting his friends as well. Over the years, she worked with more and more students, and then joined Score at the Top as an Essay Expert in 2019. Her students have been admitted to top-rated schools such as Duke, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Brown, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, and many more.

For Valladares, the best part of the job is getting to know the students and helping them tell their unique stories. She also enjoys helping them with every facet of the application process and making sure they are presenting the best, holistic picture of themselves.

Valladares lives in Weston with her husband, Manny. They have two sons – Gabriel, who graduated from Duke University in 2019, and Michael who graduated from Boston University in 2021.