Sabrina Bernadel

The Project

Sabrina provides legal services and legislative advocacy for girls of color to ensure access to education that is free of discriminatory discipline, harassment, and violence from school-based police.

Sabrina’s Fellowship project seeks to address how school resource officers (“SROs”) contribute to the overrepresentation of Black girls in every aspect of school discipline and exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline. As victims of “adultification” bias, Black girls are often viewed as less innocent than their peers. This bias creates a barrier to connecting girls of color with the supports they need to thrive in school, such as mental health resources or even legal representation after facing discrimination. When paired with school policies that allow discipline to turn on subjective impressions of student behavior, this bias leads SROs to harshly discipline, sexually harass, and exclude girls of color—ultimately pushing them out of schools and into the criminal legal system.

As a first-generation Haitian-American, Sabrina grew up relying on spaces and mentors in schools to help her explore her identity as a woman of color. Today, she is dedicated to educational equity work as a means of keeping schools safe for girls of color as they similarly come into their own. 

Fellowship Highlights to Date

So far during the Fellowship, Sabrina has:

• Reviewed, edited, and collaborated with Congressional offices on 8 federal school climate and discipline bills, set to be introduced in the 117th Congress.
• Authored a 21-page public comment on behalf of the National Women’s Law Center in response to the U.S. Department of Education’s request for information on the “nondiscriminatory administration of school discipline.”
• Convened 15 partner organizations focused on racial justice, gender justice, and disability rights and justice to strategize on advocating for the use of an intersectional approach when analyzing civil rights claims under Title VI, Title IX, and Section 504.
• Developed strategy in partnership with other civil rights organizations to bring intersectional discipline discrimination claims on behalf of students to the U.S. Department of Education (ED), Office for Civil Rights.

Next Steps

In the next year, Sabrina plans to:

• Host a series of back-to-school webinars, focused on school advocacy at the local level, school policing myths, adultification bias, and intersectionality.
• Identify and represent girls in Title VI and Title IX intersectional administrative claims brought to the ED Office for Civil Rights on the basis of discrimination in school policing and exclusionary discipline.
• Draft a model school discipline and climate bill for the 2022 state legislative sessions and support target states in introducing their adopted versions of the model bill.

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