Bob CollinsToday’s column from the Pioneer Press’ Ruben Rosario is the sort of thing you want to put before every young person in your house to whom you’ve given a smartphone. And then roll it up and smack a few parents on the side of the head with it.
It’s the story of a courageous seventh-grade girl in Woodbury who reveals how a typical middle-school relationship degenerated quickly into sexual manipulation.
“My circle of friends said they all did it,” Michaela Snyder said of the first request from a boy for a text message of her with just a bra. “They didn’t think anything of it. I felt bad about it, but I did not want to lose him.”
Among the frightening “this could happen in my house” reality checks in the piece is this one: She’s the daughter of a police sergeant in the crimes against children unit in Minneapolis, who knew enough to warn his daughter about how girls end up in horrible situations. But it wasn’t enough.
“I believe if you gave information, that was protection enough. It wasn’t,” Grant Snyder said.
Oh, it gets worse. In the upscale school district where people often think pretty highly of themselves, some parents joined in the bullying.
The bullying began, Michaela says, after rumors spread in the school about the sexting and that she had “outed” the boyfriend to her parents. She was tripped up at school and called worthless, a slut and other names, mostly in text messages. She often ate her lunch in the restroom because no one she knew would allow her to sit next to them in the cafeteria. When she decided one day to eat her lunch in the locker-room area, “I was told (by a teacher) that I could not do it there and to go to the (school) office to eat it there,” she said.
Snyder said he and his wife complained to school officials about the bullying incidents. Dissatisfied with the responses (the culprits denied doing anything), he said he took matters into his own hands after he found out that, during the bus ride home one day, three boys told his daughter, “You should die.”
He went to the homes, accompanied by Michaela, and civilly brought up the bus incident. The fathers of two of the boys expressed shock and confronted them. Both boys expressed remorse and apologized. One of them hugged Michaela.
The third stop, however, went down quite differently, Grant Snyder recalled. The boy was laughing and snickering as Snyder explained the behavior to his parents.
“The dad basically accused Michaela of being manipulative,” Grant Snyder said. “He asked me if I had any proof. I did not identify myself (as a cop) and I did not go over there with anything but respect.”
He was also taken aback by his phone conversation after he learned of the pictures with the mother of the boy his daughter had dated.
“I expected emotion, but she was flat in tone, like it did not register with her,” he recalled. “I never got a call back from her or from the father.”
Her parents kept her at Lake Middle School against her wishes. They felt she would be better off facing a hostile world.
