Sarah Berger Sandelius
Founder and CEO
The Ability Challenge

Sarah Sandelius has over 15 years of experience driving education law and policy on behalf of our nation’s young people, focusing on the most vulnerable populations, including disconnected youth and students with disabilities. In founding The Ability Challenge, Sarah aims to solve the opportunity gap between students with disabilities and their general education peers by working with schools and other non-profits to create robust educational environments that are truly responsive to the needs of diverse learners. She also currently runs FlipTurn Education Consulting, a firm that advises on strategic projects pertaining to special education, correctional education and juvenile justice, privacy and information sharing, interagency collaboration, and discipline in schools. Unlike many traditional lawyers, Sarah takes a programmatic and operational approach to her consulting work by using data, focusing on training and capacity building and engaging stakeholders to build cross-functional teams.

Prior to consulting, Sarah spent most of her career at the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE), serving as Executive Director of Policy and Student Advocacy for NYC DOE’s alternative schools district and then as Senior Counsel for Litigation and Policy. In these roles, she managed class action litigation, developed interagency information sharing agreements, created comprehensive compliance protocols for key regulatory issues, and provided high-level legal and policy advice to several of the Department’s program offices. In her NYCDOE work, Sarah primarily worked on issues affecting New York’s most vulnerable populations, including youth involved with the justice system, students with disabilities, young people subject to discipline, student parents and more.  

Earlier in her career, Sarah managed special projects at Teach for America – New York City and spent several years practicing corporate law in the areas of education law and litigation at Hogan and Hartson, LLP (now Hogan Lovells) in Washington DC. She graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies and obtained her Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law. She currently lives in Chevy Chase, MD with her husband and 6-year-old daughter.