Janet Sorg Stoltzfus

Janet Lucille Sorg Stoltzfus (May 24, 1931 – March 5, 2004) was an American educator. As a teacher married to an American diplomat, she established the Ta'iz Cooperative School, the first foreign school in North Yemen. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Bachelor of Letters degree at Trinity College Dublin in 1953.

Career Sorg was teaching English at the Beirut College for Women when she met her husband, American diplomat William A. Stoltzfus Jr. "A typical Foreign Service couple of middle rank are crew-cut William Stoltzfus Jr. and his delicately pretty wife Janet," wrote columnist Jack Anderson in 1962.

With her husband leading the U.S. legation based in Taiz that formed the center of United States–Yemen relations at the time, the Stoltzfuses were in North Yemen from 1959 to 1961. There, she was the sole teacher at the Ta'iz Cooperative School, a one-room co-educational elementary program she founded in her home. The school originally intended to educate the young children of embassy families, but soon including Yemeni children as well, with permission from the ruler, imam Ahmad bin Yahya. It was the first foreign and non-religious school in north Yemen. A British woman, Joan Bailey, wife of the British diplomat Ronald Bailey, helped at the Taiz school, by teaching sewing and knitting classes. She also founded a newsletter for senior citizens in London in the 1980s, titled The Ellesmere Gazette. the Stoltzfus home in Princeton, New Jersey, featured "crosses from Ethiopia, copperware from Iran, royal Arabic seals from Bahrein, a brass chest and a tall exquisite coffee pot from Saudi Arabia, and a massive hand-carved door from Kuwait", all souvenirs of their overseas service. Janet Stoltzfus taught English and religion at Princeton Day School. One of her students at Princeton Day School was Erik Menendez, and she was one of the former teachers called as a witness at his murder trial.

Personal life Janet Sorg married William A. Stoltzfus Jr. in 1954. Philip, Winifred, Susan, and Rebecca, all raised in part as embassy children. "We subsisted on cans of baked beans from the U.S. military base in Ethiopia," Stoltzfus recalled, "We had a lot of liquor, though." She died from cancer in 2004, at the age of 72, in Princeton, New Jersey.