The Gloucester County Institute of Technology and its superintendent are facing multiple lawsuits after the school’s former principal and the administrator who replaced her filed complaints alleging the school discriminated against them and mishandled its recent staff cuts.
Two lawsuits, filed in June weeks after GCIT first voted on the cuts, are the latest in a series of legal actions against GCIT alleging retaliatory and discriminatory behavior.
GCIT, the sole school in the Gloucester County Vocational-Technical School District, did not renew the contract of former principal Sybil Girard and two teachers. The school also cut the positions of former vocational education director Gina Mateka, another teacher, and the aquatics coordinator in a reduction of force.
The cuts, a response to a $500,000 budget shortfall that was only partially supplemented by the county, came down in a unanimous vote first in May and then again in August, according to meeting minutes approved last week. They follow budget struggles across South Jersey school districts.
Girard, who was hired in 2020 and was the district’s only Black administrator as well as the first Black principal in GCIT’s 55-year history, according to the complaint, sued the Deptford tech school and its superintendent, Susan Heiken, about four weeks before the school first voted not to renew her contract. She alleged racial- and gender-based microaggressions, negative performance reviews, and exclusion from staff hiring processes.
In a separate lawsuit filed in June, Girard alleged the school board voted not to renew her contract without providing the 48-hour notice required by New Jersey’s Open Public Meetings Act.
That case closed in state court Thursday, after GCIT’s school board hosted a special meeting, only two minutes long, to redo the personnel vote with proper notice.
Mateka, meanwhile, alleged in another June lawsuit that the district cut her administrative position and demoted her to principal to retaliate against a suit she filed last year alleging age and gender discrimination.
Mateka’s position was the only administrator role cut by August’s reduction in force, and the only tenured administrator position eliminated, according to her lawsuit.
Both Girard and Mateka declined to comment due to ongoing litigation. Heiken did not return repeated requests for comment, nor did Assistant Superintendent Amy Capriotti, who sits on the GCIT school board. Two board members also did not return requests for comment.
Students and others in the district community have spoken out against the staff reductions by defending the impact Girard and their teachers have had on their lives.
“For us GCIT students, our teachers and staff serve as parental figures, inspirations, support systems, and outlets; it would be a grave disservice to them, the students, the school, and morale to let them go,” former student Serena Smith wrote in a Change.org petition to call for the protection of staff. The petition garnered more than 1,600 signatures.
At board meetings leading up to the cuts, dozens spoke in defense of Girard and other employees at risk. At one March meeting, 58 people spoke, according to meeting minutes, and those comments took up more than 2½ hours.
A longtime district employee, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, said recent actions taken by Heiken have hurt staff morale.
“Nobody is feeling secure,” they said.
Mounting complaints
Mateka’s beef with Heiken and the Gloucester County Vocational-Technical School District began in 2022.
The district had long shared its school board and administration with the Gloucester County Special Services School District, which educates children with disabilities, down the street.
But county officials restructured the district in 2022 and split the Deptford education campus back into two separate entities, meaning each school had to find its own staff.
Heiken became the temporary superintendent at the special services district while the school sought a permanent option.
According to an April 2025 complaint, Mateka saw herself as that option. She worked for the vocational technical school district since 1997 and became a shared chief academic officer in 2014.
With her teaching and administrative experience, Mateka applied for the superintendent opening at the special services school district, but the district’s board of education chose to hire James Dundee, a principal at GCIT, instead. Dundee is still superintendent.
Mateka sued GCSSSD, its school board, Dundee, and Heiken. She claimed the district did not handle the hiring process equitably, due in part to her age — she was 66 years old when she applied — and gender.
She alleged that Dundee did not have teaching experience, had never been a superintendent or assistant superintendent, and was not certified by the state to be a school administrator. That lack of experience, the complaint alleges, meant Dundee required a mentor when he was hired.
The same day, Brian Shakespeare, who held several roles at GCSSSD since 1992, also filed a lawsuit alleging age-based discrimination, since Shakespeare — 10 years Dundee’s senior — had applied for the position and lost out, too.
Both lawsuits are ongoing in state court.
Girard’s discrimination lawsuit came in April 2026, about a year after the complaints by Mateka and Shakespeare.
In its 20 pages, Girard alleges Heiken sought “dirt” on her and another Black administrator (who had her own racial discrimination lawsuit seeking $300,000 against GCSSSD, Heiken, and Dundee until the case was settled this summer), demoted Girard but not her white colleagues, refused to call her by her professional title, and constantly left Girard out of the loop.
After she first reported Heiken’s discrimination to the district’s human resources department, the complaint alleges, Heiken began to try to force Girard out of her position, including cutting Girard’s speech from the 2025 GCIT graduation program.
When GCIT did investigate Girard’s discrimination allegations, no one ever asked why she felt discriminated against, the lawsuit reads, and GCIT’s counsel notified Girard that her complaints were “unsubstantiated.”
This is the second consecutive year that GCIT had to pursue a reduction in force due to rising costs and cuts to state education funding, Heiken said during a spring budget hearing.
“[The rising costs are] primarily everything that we need to run a school,” Heiken said in the meeting recorded by the Woodbury Warbler. “Our energy costs, our medical infrastructure costs have risen double digits.”
Carl Heil, GCIT’s teachers union president, said in an interview that the district was ”going through tough waters.”
“My hope is that we navigate it together rather than someone just making decisions and us just dealing with it,” Heil said.
