Stacy Deemar, who is white, filed the lawsuit Tuesday, claiming the teacher training and lessons about race and racism discriminated against her.

Deemar’s attorney, Kimberly Hermann, explains that the lawsuit is centered around how the District’s race-conscious training, policies and curriculum violate federal law through “segregating its students and treating them differently because of their race.”

Here is the Federal Court filing:

Click to access 2021-06-29-deemar-v-district-65.pdf

“The district is doing several things, one of them is segregating its teachers in its teacher training by their skin color,” Hermann said. “You put the white teachers in one room, and the non-white teachers in another room, and you actually give them different training.”

District 65 outlines its race-conscious policies in detail, saying on its website that they are “identifying practices, policies and institutional barriers, including institutional racism and privilege, which perpetuate opportunity and achievement gaps.

“The department of education spent 18 months investigating District 65 and actually found that, earlier this year, only to be withdrawn several days after the Biden administration took office,” Hermann said. 

Hermann also claims the policy discriminates against her due to its use of a children’s book titled ‘Racism is a white person’s problem and we are all caught up in it.’ 

“When you read through this book, quite frankly it is teaching non-white students to hate, and it is teaching white students to hate themselves,” said Hermann. 

Hermann claims the lawsuit is not about whether or not we should teach children about racism, but that it is about what the district is telling students to think.

“When you have a picture of a white person dressed as a devil, telling the students that whiteness is a bad deal, and telling students that they need to sign away their whiteness, or in the classroom, saying an anti-racist pledge and putting it up on the board to look at every single day, you are telling students that they are either oppressed or the oppressor solely because of their skin color,” Herman said. “Let’s get back to teaching people to look at the inside of people, and not put skin color as the only thing that we are looking at about a person.”

Deemar is represented by a conservative law firm, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, based in Georgia.

According to her lawsuit, Deemar only spoke out against the district’s racial equity policies once — during a February 2016 meeting about a book for teachers to use multiethnic folk literature in drama class. 

When she did, “her colleagues interrupted her, rolled their eyes, and told Plaintiff she did not know what she was talking about.” Deemar figured “if she voiced her concerns further, she would be marginalized and face further humiliation from her colleagues,” according to her complaint.

“Creative drama affords all students the opportunity to flourish in a non-traditional setting regardless of academic abilities,” Deemar said when the district announced the award six years ago. “The beauty of creative drama is that students use their visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic and logical intelligences.”null

According to her lawsuit, Deemar only spoke out against the district’s racial equity policies once — during a February 2016 meeting about a book for teachers to use multiethnic folk literature in drama class. 

When she did, “her colleagues interrupted her, rolled their eyes, and told Plaintiff she did not know what she was talking about.” Deemar figured “if she voiced her concerns further, she would be marginalized and face further humiliation from her colleagues,” according to her complaint. 

According to an earlier complaint Deemar filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in June 2019, summarized in a January 2021 letter of finding, the district began discriminating against white staff, students and job applicants in the 2017-18 school year.

And during the 2018-19 school year, the drama teacher told federal education officials, she suffered discrimination due to the district’s failure to sufficiently discipline students who assaulted her — and retaliation when administrators canceled portions of a second grade musical. 

Carol Ashley, enforcement director of the civil rights office, told District 65 Superintendent Devon Horton there was insufficient evidence that administrators had retaliated against Deemar. 

But Ashley’s office concluded that the district had “engaged in intentional race discrimination” with its use of racially exclusive “affinity groups,” “privilege walks” that separate students based on race, and a curriculum that required district staff to treat people differently based on race.

“[T]he District appears to have deliberately singled out students and other individuals by their race, in order to reduce them to a set of racial stereotypes. Title VI bars such discriminatory conduct,” Ashley said.

The office found that the district’s policy to explicitly consider the race of students when disciplining them also violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, with Ashley expressing “serious concerns” that District 65’s anti-racist training may have created a racially hostile environment. 

“[T]hese [training] materials, if used as directed, would have led students to be treated differently based on their race, depriving them of the benefit of a classroom free from racial recrimination and hostility,” the enforcement director added. “Such treatment has no place in federally funded programs or activities.”

District 65 Director of Communications Melissa Messinger told The Daily in a statement that the district has not yet been served with the lawsuit or evaluated its claims. As a result, she said District 65 declined to comment on the lawsuit’s content.