Susan Payne’s Shift: From Safe2Tell Founder to Extremist Partner
Susan Payne built her name on Safe2Tell, a program that gave students a way to report threats without fear. For years, she was introduced as a guardian of children, the professional face of prevention. Yet 2025 has shown us something else: Payne’s steady march into the arms of extremist groups.
March: She appeared at a national Moms for Liberty gathering, sharing the spotlight with an outfit the Southern Poverty Law Center now calls an anti-government extremist group.
May: She attended a straw poll hosted by Advocates for D20 Kids, Moms for Liberty, and Church for All Nations, where she was selected for their coordinated backing.
August: She announced a partnership with the Colorado Parents Advocacy Network (CPAN), a group entangled in book bans, anti-LGBTQ lawsuits, and disinformation campaigns.
That sequence alone tells us more than any speech about “student safety.” It tells us where she is choosing to stand.
Why Susan Payne’s Alliance with CPAN and Moms for Liberty Matters
CPAN is not a parent-teacher committee gone rogue. It was built from the start with the Independence Institute at its elbow, a think tank funded by national conservative donors. It has staged “sting” operations against Colorado’s youth crisis hotline, falsely claiming counselors were “grooming” children. It has pushed ballot measures to force schools to out transgender students, and it joined a lawsuit seeking the right to misgender people as a matter of “belief”.
The group collaborates freely: with Moms for Liberty, with Parents Defending Education, with Turning Point USA, and even with FEC United, a militia-linked operation founded by Joe Oltmann. When CPAN holds up a banner about parental rights, the shadow behind it is Christian nationalism and coordinated culture-war politics.
So when Payne chooses to align herself with CPAN, she is not stepping into neutral territory. She is lending credibility to a network that has openly targeted public education, marginalized students, and even suicide-prevention services. Maybe she thinks this is the next stage of her advocacy. Maybe she believes she can use their machinery for her cause. But history suggests the opposite: groups like CPAN use public figures as cover, as proof that their hardline agenda has a respectable face.
And Payne provides that face.
What Susan Payne’s Choices Reveal About Her True Agenda
Payne tells the press she loses sleep over competency laws. Fine. But the real question is whether parents should lose sleep over her alliances. Safe2Tell was once about trust, about creating a channel where kids could speak without fear. That legacy does not square with joining arms with groups that brand teachers “groomers,” strip protections from LGBTQ youth, and import national conspiracy politics into Colorado classrooms.
It is time to stop pretending. Susan Payne is not simply a safety advocate. She has chosen to stand with Moms for Liberty, with Advocates for D20 Kids, with Church for All Nations, and now with CPAN. These are not neutral actors. They are the scaffolding of a movement determined to recast education in narrow, exclusionary terms. This structure serves as a clear indication of what her continued tenure on the Academy District 20 board would mean for the community.
Parents, educators, community members: remember this alignment. When Payne speaks of safety, ask whose safety she means. When she claims to protect children, look closely at the company she keeps. Because reputations built on trust can be repurposed, and Payne’s is now carrying water for a very different cause.