The Poudre records: How a school “safe space” became a five-year parental-rights battle

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

It has been just over five years. No one has been held accountable.

That is how Erin Lee describes what happened on May 4, 2021 and everything since. Federal litigation, Supreme Court petitions and public records battles have produced thousands of pages of emails, court filings and internal policies. “It’s been an insane five years,” she told RMV in May.

“She came home and excitedly proclaimed she was transgender”

The Lees moved from Florida to Wellington, Colorado in 2020. Erin says she and her husband were “faithless, left-leaning parents” with a close relationship with their daughter.

In spring 2021 that daughter had just turned twelve and was enrolled at Wellington Middle School. Her homeroom and art teacher was Jenna Riep, also the school’s Gender and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) sponsor.

GSA clubs are a statewide network developed and supported by One Colorado Education Fund, a Denver-based LGBTQ advocacy organization.

The Lees eventually filed a lawsuit over what happened with their daughter.

The Tenth Circuit found that Riep had private conversations with Erin Lee’s daughter about gender identity before May 4, 2021. She had never previously questioned her gender identity, according to Lee.

Riep approached her unsolicited. “Hey, you know, you seem lonely. Do you want to make some friends after school? I run an art club,” Lee recalled. Her daughter texted her parents. They gave permission.

She arrived to find a different kind of meeting.

The guest speaker was Kimberly Chambers, director of SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado, a Fort Collins LGBTQ+ youth organization, and at the time a substitute teacher within the district. According to documents obtained by Parents Defending Education, Chambers was also a paid Larimer County Department of Health and Environment employee with access to student information. 

Chambers began with a rule, Lee said: that what you hear in here stays in here.

What followed is documented in the federal complaint and Tenth Circuit opinion.

Chambers told students that if they were not completely comfortable in their bodies they were likely transgender and that transgender youth are more likely to attempt suicide than their cisgender peers. The complaint alleges Riep and Chambers covered polyamory, puberty blockers, gender identities, sexualities, name and pronoun changes and explicitly, keeping discussions secret from parents.

Students who came out received flags, stickers and bracelets.

When Lee’s daughter told Chambers she didn’t know who she was attracted to, Lee said Chambers responded, “That means you’re queer. That’s a term we use while we’re still figuring out who we’re sexually attracted to.” Chambers distributed her personal cell phone number so students could contact her privately.

The instruction not to tell parents came more than once. “She emphasized repeatedly, ‘you don’t have to tell your parents, this is our safe space,'” Lee said. As the meeting ended Riep reinforced it. The Tenth Circuit documented the exchange precisely: the girl told Riep she intended to tell her mother because she believed her mother would be accepting. Riep’s response was to reiterate that she didn’t have to.

“We’re lucky she did. Because we had such a good relationship with her.”

Her daughter came home transformed. “Oh, mom, I understand why I’m so uncomfortable in my body. It’s because I’m trans. And I’m going to go by Toby now.” She handed her mother a card for Kimberly Chambers.

That evening, in an email later produced through a CORA request, she sent Riep and the school counselor a link to SPLASH’s private Discord server with instructions for students to add her as a “friend” — a private channel for ongoing communication with children outside their parents’ knowledge.

“They intended not to tell us”

Lee emailed SPLASH demanding to know what had been shared with her daughter.

That morning, before responding to Lee, Chambers sent a separate email to Riep and the school counselor, with SPLASH volunteer Silen Wellington copied. Produced through the same records request, it read, “Tread lightly because this parent has HUGE potential to coming in to understanding or rejecting their child… Any conversation with this parent should have the impression in our minds as ‘evidence’, verbiage is everything.”
Chambers then replied to Lee with her explanation, offering coffee and expressing enthusiasm about Lee’s apparent openness to her daughter’s “new identity.”

The next morning, May 7, 2021, Chambers emailed Riep, “As needed, you have a strong ally in our Board of Education… Kristen Draper has been briefed on this parents’ outreach.” Draper was then a board director and went on to serve as Board president from 2023 to 2025.  

Less than an hour later, Chambers emailed Riep again with a suggestion: “If that persists, you’ll want to talk to admin about doing a well-child check or whatever is within the policies of the school.”

In a public document filed the following year, Chambers described herself as “a certified sexual assault advocate, public health worker, and former educator” who had “activated dozens of CPS reports” on behalf of minors she worked with.

Days later, Principal Kelby Benedict came to the Lee home. The family’s lawsuit called the visit a “de facto well-child check. During that visit, Benedict confirmed to the Lees that the GSA clubs “created an expectation of confidentiality” to create a safe space. Lee says Benedict acknowledged being under institutional pressure. “You don’t understand the parents of these kids who believe they’re trans. I have so much pressure from them.”

What followed confirmed it.

On May 12, 2022, Madeline Noblett, PSD’s Executive Director of Communications, emailed the district’s Cabinet, communications staff and Seitchik with a document attached. “Attached is an email Kelby will send this evening to all staff and parents/guardians at Wellington Middle School,” Noblett wrote. “It addresses the national news coverage that’s ongoing.”

She noted a story was expected on Tucker Carlson’s show that night and directed staff to use the letter as “the district’s response” to all media inquiries going forward. The letter was a district communications strategy distributed through Benedict as the public face.

The letter named Lee by name as the source of the controversy and declined to address the accuracy of her account, citing student confidentiality — a posture Lee says was designed to cast doubt on her without directly refuting her. “They know it’s all true,” she said.

It described the May 2021 meeting as Chambers sharing “information about how SPLASH could be a resource to LGBTQIA+ students, terms were defined, and Ms. Chambers fielded questions generated by the students.”

It did not mention the 90-minute lecture, the prizes for coming out, or the instructions not to tell parents. It confirmed that GSA discussions “may be confidential” because students may be “out” at school but not at home — which Lee says amounted to an admission that the school kept it secret from parents by design.

It directed the entire school community to One Colorado as a GSA resource. It stated that students “voluntarily attend” the GSA.

Lee’s daughter was invited to what she believed was an art club. “She did not know what she was walking into,” Lee said. “She was not trans before adults convinced her she was in that room.”

PSD cut ties with SPLASH in May 2022. 

“She became suicidal”

State laws required therapists to affirm the identity her daughter had declared at the meeting. “We learned the hard way about the laws that forced therapists to affirm. That made her worse. She became suicidal.”

The Lees were not alone.

A second Wellington family, joined with the Lees in federal court, had a daughter who asked her parents in May 2021 if she could attend what she called an after-school anime club. The family’s lawsuit states the daughter knew the club was actually the school-sponsored GSA and used a different name with her parents on the advice of a transgender friend who warned that her parents might not allow her to go if they knew the club’s true nature.

Her parents gave permission.

The second family’s daughter attended Riep’s GSA on May 11, 2021, and again on May 18.

According to the Tenth Circuit, she received the same messages the Lees’ daughter had: that not feeling comfortable in your body suggests you are probably transgender, that parents routinely misassign gender at birth, that transgender young people attempt suicide at higher rates than their peers, and that what happens in the club stays there. She was not struggling with gender identity or suicidal ideation before those meetings. Afterward she was.

Over the next six months she came to interpret her own suicidal thoughts as confirmation she must be transgender, a loop that tightened through the fall. In December 2021 she asked her parents to homeschool her rather than return to Wellington. She attempted suicide by drinking bleach that same month. She received medical and psychiatric care and re-enrolled for eighth grade. She asked her parents to remove her again because she didn’t feel safe being at the same school as Riep.

The two families had no contact with each other until Lee’s account went public in 2022, when they recognized what they’d been through.

“Not a single PSD employee reached out to us,” the girl’s father testified before the PSD board, “to understand what in the PSD environment may have contributed to her decision to end her life.”

What the records show, and what followed

Riep remains listed as an art teacher on Wellington Middle-High School’s staff directory today.

When the families filed suit in 2023 the district’s appellate attorney called the Wellington staff “rogue employees.” The record contradicted that at every turn.

In his May 2022 school-wide email, Benedict himself told parents the GSA was “school-sponsored.” The family’s lawsuit alleged that school-sponsored clubs could have guest speakers only with approval from PSD’s Teaching and Learning Department, meaning Chambers’ appearance, if properly authorized, was not a rogue act. 

PSD’s LGBTQIA+ Coordinator Shayna Seitchik emailed Riep on May 9, 2022 after one of Lee’s videos gained traction. “I imagine you anticipated this happening,” Seitchik wrote, “and it can be hard to face backlash for your work to support your students.”

Riep replied that it was “frustrating with how inaccurate the story is” — referring to the media coverage of the Wellington GSA.

On August 11, 2021, Chambers emailed John McKay, PSD’s Director of Language, Culture & Equity, seeking to formalize the partnership. Chambers asked, “Can we do an MOU or something to ensure that the district, splash, and I am protected moving forward?”

McKay agreed and committed to pausing SPLASH visits to GSAs until the MOU was in place, writing, “I understand the need to hold off on visiting GSA’s and believe until we get an MOU in place, we should wait to ensure your humanity and clear relationship between PSD and NocoSplash.”

The Tenth Circuit affirmed dismissal of the case in April 2025 on a procedural question of whether the parents had sufficiently alleged that PSD’s official policies — rather than individual employees — were the driving force behind their injuries. The merits of what happened at Wellington Middle School were never adjudicated.

Judge Carolyn McHugh, sitting on the three-judge panel, wrote a separate concurrence to say that while the case had to be dismissed on those procedural grounds, the parents had alleged a cognizable constitutional violation. “The district’s policy of helping students keep their parents in the dark about their gender identities turns this presumption on its head,” she wrote, referring to the constitutional “presumption that fit parents act in the best interests of their children.”

When the Supreme Court denied review on October 14, 2025, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, wrote that the “troubling — and tragic — allegations in this case underscore the ‘great and growing national importance'” of the constitutional question.

Records show the GSA club at Wellington Middle School — operated by Riep and PSD, connected to One Colorado Education Fund’s statewide GSA network — contributed to severe mental health crises in at least two students, including suicide attempts.

Lee says Wellington is not an isolated case. “It’s usually a call from another parent whose kid’s gone missing or who’s been harmed in the school,” she said.

Lee is now the Executive Director of Protect Kids Colorado and a public face of three ballot initiatives her organization put before Colorado voters this November: Initiative 108, which would impose life sentences without parole for child sex trafficking; Initiative 109, which would require school athletic teams to be designated by biological sex; and Initiative 110, which would prohibit surgeries on minors for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics. Lee will speak at RMV’s Freedom Fest on Friday, June 26.

An opposition campaign – largely funded by One Colorado – launched earlier this year has raised more than $320,000 against Initiatives 109 and 110.