A Crown Point woman is suing the Gary Community School Corporation in federal court for racial discrimination and discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act because she believes the district subjected her to “race-based disparate treatment.”
Deanna Geertsema, in a lawsuit filed July 16 with the U.S. District Court of Northern Indiana in Hammond, is asking the court to declare that GCSC violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the ADA of 1990 when it moved her to the fourth grade from the second grade class she was teaching.
Geertsema, who is white, alleges in the lawsuit that she was discriminated against because of her race.
She is asking for the corporation “to remove or correct challenged reprimands, an improvement plan, and performance ratings in Plaintiff’s personnel records,” as well as pay her “back pay, front pay, lost benefits, and other make-whole relief to the extent established by the evidence.”
GCSC School Board President Michael Suggs on Tuesday declined comment, but GCSC Spokeswoman Chelsea Stallings Whittington said the corporation hasn’t yet received a copy of the lawsuit and doesn’t comment on personnel matters nor pending litigation.
“Gary Community School Corporation is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, religion, or any other protected status in accordance with federal and state laws,” Whittington said in an email.
Geertsema, who was a second-grade teacher at Daniel Hale Williams Elementary School in Gary, on November 11, 2019, submitted a written complaint to the district alleging that her students and their parents “showed her less respect because she is White and that challenging students showed more respect for Black teachers,” the lawsuit said.
She continued to work at the school through the 2024-2025 school year, according to the lawsuit and the Indiana Gateway database, and she “continued to encounter classroom-management issues and reported concerns about inadequate support, procedural fairness, and race bias,” the lawsuit said.
GCSC in March 2025 placed Geertsema on paid administrative leave after someone reported her to the Indiana Department of Child Services for possible physical abuse or neglect, though DCS rendered the report “unsubstantiated,” according to the lawsuit.
A month after the DCS report, Geertsema met with Williams Elementary Principal Linda Golston, Chief Human Resources Officer Jovanka Cvitkovich, and union president GlenEva Dunham about the report, court records said.
In that meeting, Geertsema told them a student said “he would never respect her because she was white,” and that the student’s parent confirmed the racial issue to another teacher.
Geertsema alleged in the suit that GCSC “did not investigate or otherwise address (her) report of race-based disrespect,” but said Dunham told her that “some Black kids have never experienced a white teacher,” that “sometimes we don’t gel,” and that “our cultures don’t mix,” among other things, court records said.
Dunham then said Geertsema had become “unraveled” by a second grader and “suggested that (Geertsema) might need ‘some intervention’ for herself,” at which point Cvitkovich referred her to counseling and Employee Assistance Program resources, “even though Plaintiff had not disclosed a mental-health condition or requested help or an accommodation,” court records said.
“The counseling referral occurred in a disciplinary context and, together with the comments about Plaintiff being ‘unraveled’ and needing intervention, reflected a perception that Plaintiff had a mental or psychological impairment that affected her ability to teach,” the lawsuit said.
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Less than a week after the meeting with Golston, Cvitkovich and Duhnam, GCSC administrators issued Geertsema two formal reprimand letters and placed her on a teacher improvement plan without giving her “prior notice of the allegations to be addressed or a meaningful opportunity to prepare a response,” records said. Geertsema contested the letters, “raising race bias and procedural irregularities, and asserting that student and parent racial bias had influenced the discipline,” the lawsuit said.
A month later in May 2025, Geertsema, who at that point had filed a complaint against GCSC with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, received her performance evaluation with nine “Effective ratings” and 14 “Ineffective” ratings, court records said. Geertsema noted in the suit that she’d not had a poor evaluation before and that two Black second-grade teachers who endured similar “classroom-management challenges” weren’t reprimanded or forced to go on leave.
After undergoing a “lengthy re-observation May 15, 2025,” administrators told Geertsema that she would be moved to teach “one subject in fourth grade because she supposedly had skills she needed to learn, even though (her) students had achieved strong reading-assessment results,” according to the lawsuit.
“(GCSC) subjected (Geertsema) to race-based disparate treatment, retaliated after she opposed race discrimination and filed an EEOC charge, and discriminated against her because it regarded her as having a mental or psychological impairment,” the lawsuit said.
Geertsma is currently listed as a teacher with Virgil Bailey Elementary School in Lake Station, according to Indiana Gateway. It’s unclear whether she’s still with GCSC.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.