At first glance, the Academy District 20 Board of Education’s 2025–2026 “social contract” looks like a friendly team-building exercise. Polite. Professional. Full of reassuring words about trust, communication, and shared values.
Look closer. The subtext is harder to miss. This document isn’t about building cohesion. It’s about building a firewall between board deliberations and the public’s right to know under Colorado’s Open Records Act (CORA). And when it comes to Susan Payne‘s transparency, the reality is not what the public deserves.
Off the record by design
Nearly every communication norm steers board members away from discoverable email and toward conversations that leave no trail. The contract explicitly encourages members to “Communicate in-person or by phone” and to “Text and make phone calls” with the Superintendent. Even feedback on the Superintendent’s weekly update is directed to happen “without reply all”. That’s not etiquette, it’s engineered opacity.
Centralized control of narrative
Board members are instructed to “Rely on the Board President to be our spokesperson” and to only “Reflect the decisions, events, and shared values of the Board”. Translation: no public dissent, no independent commentary, no trace of debate. The public gets a script, not deliberation.
Private pre-coordination
The contract doesn’t encourage members to bring new ideas to the full board. Instead, it directs them to share proposals during “agenda-setting meetings” or in one-on-ones with the Superintendent and Board President. Even questions are supposed to be filtered through email, “pre-cleared” with leadership. That’s not transparency. It’s choreography.
None of this is accidental. It’s structurally consistent. The only practical reason for this “social contract” is to make circumventing CORA easier. A board that truly valued openness would design communication practices to document debate, not bury it.
And that’s the deeper civic cost. When decisions migrate into private texts and hallway conversations, the public loses not just access to records but confidence in the integrity of governance itself. A school board ceases to be a deliberative body representing the community and begins to resemble a managed narrative machine.
This is not transparency. It’s unacceptable.
Now the question: will Susan Payne and the rest of her extremist allies on the board just let this float by, buried in the consent agenda under Resolution 289-25, “Approval of Language Revisions to Board of Education Social Contract,” at the September 11 meeting? Or will anyone on that dais stand up for the community’s right to see how decisions are really made?