Cara McClellan, GED’12
“Despite its many challenges, the pandemic has also created an opportunity to radically reimagine how public education in America can live up to its promise of equal opportunity”
“Despite its many challenges, the pandemic has also created an opportunity to radically reimagine how public education in America can live up to its promise of equal opportunity,” says Cara McClellan, GED’12, assistant counsel at NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who earned her master’s in urban teaching at Penn GSE. “In our school desegregation work, LDF has worked to address racial inequities in the distribution of meals and access to distance learning. As others have poignantly described, we are facing two prolonged pandemics: the COVID-19 virus and persistent racism. In our work, we also use litigation and policy to fight against the criminalization of youth of color, including by advocating to end exclusionary discipline and to remove police from schools. These overly punitive policies disproportionately impact Black and Latinx students and, if left unaddressed, the barriers created by discriminatory discipline will only be exacerbated by the pandemic.” Cara is lead counsel in a lawsuit representing four girls of color who were illegally strip searched at their middle school. She is also counsel on lawsuits including SFFA v. Harvard, Sheff v. O'Neill, and Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education. In 2018, she authored the report Our Girls, Our Future: Investing in Opportunity and Reducing Reliance on the Criminal Justice System in Baltimore.