Minnesota state representative Chris Swedzinski (R-Ghent), welder and farmer, is a Ridgewater College and Minnesota State University at Mankato grad who has served as congressional district aide and USDA community development specialist based in Waite Park.
Swedzinski was first elected to the House from the Marshall, Minnesota, area in 2010, filling the seat vacated by Marty Seifert when the former minority decided to make his first swipe at the governor's office.
If Anti-bullying law a reality — to the chagrin of Republicans, an article in the Marshall Independent is to be believed, somewhere along the line the father of four also became an expert on urban family dynamics.
Swedzinski told Independent editor Pet Peterson:
. . . I think there's a general disengagement with parents in the lives of their children, maybe not in southwest Minnesota, but there are issues in the urban and metro areas, and I think that's where they were trying to go after with these policies. Unfortunately, they're sweeping us all up with it at the same time."
Urban and metro parents are somehow exhibiting a "general disengagement" with their children?
This statement seems to fall in line with statements by a couple of rural Republicans who claimed that bullying wasn't a rural issue. Unfortunately, Swedzinski has a short memory. In 2011, the Huffington Post contributor Lisa Flam reported in Moms of Minnesota Girls: No Warning Signs Before Suicides:
The mothers of two Minnesota eighth-graders who hanged themselves during a sleepover said today that there were no warning signs and that they had tried to help their daughters cope with bullying the best they could.
Best friends Haylee Fentress and Paige Moravetz of rural Lynd, Minn., had an apparent suicide pact and were found dead April 16 at Haylee's house. The girls, both 14, were being treated for depression, and Haylee was on medication, but their mothers said there were no indications they were going to take their lives. . .
The girls had talked about being bullied, and both mothers said it came through Facebook and texting."Kids are so mean and cruel to each other," Fentress said. "The things that they say to each other, it's horrible."
Haylee had complained to relatives that students had made fun of her weight and red hair, NBC reported. And she had posted on Facebook that kids were mean to her. . . .
Both girls attended school in Marshall.
Bluestem believes the girls' parents loved them very much--just as "urban and metro" parents love their kids.There's no evidence the bereaved mothers in his own community were "disengaged" from their children's lives. Perhaps Swedzinski should just be less judgmental about parents in other communities, given that bullying occurs in his own community. Shame on him for blaming parents.
Photo: Representative Swedinski
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