Ex-bus monitor teaches kindness year after bullying
GREECE, N.Y. — No new carpet or furniture for the house she’s lived in for 46 years. No fancy car in the driveway.
After being given a life-changing sum as a result of a school bus bullying episode seen around the world a year ago, former bus monitor Karen Klein says she really hasn’t changed all that much.
Sure, her “Today” show coffee mug reminds her of the media attention her story got, and the occasional stranger wants to snap her picture. She’s also retired, which she couldn’t afford before.
But Klein, a 69year-old widow who drove a school bus for 20 years before spending three years as a monitor, is as unassuming as she was before learning how the kindness of strangers can trump the cruelty of four adolescent boys.
“It’s really amazing,” Klein said at her suburban Rochester home, still perplexed at the outpouring unleashed by a 10-minute cellphone video of her being ridiculed, sworn at and threatened by seventh-graders last June. They poke at her hearing aid and call her names as she tries to ignore them.
The video, recorded by a fellow student, was posted online and viewed more than 1.4 million times on YouTube.
When Canadian Max Sidorov, 25, was moved to take up an online collection to send her on vacation, more than 32,000 people from 84 countries responded — pledging $703,873 in donations.
“It’s just the way it hits them, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know,” Klein said.
Klein used $100,000 as seed money for the Karen Klein Anti-Bullying Foundation, which has promoted its message of kindness at concerts and in books.
“There’s a lot I wish I could be doing, but I don’t know how to do it,” Klein said. “I’m just a regular old lady,” she added with a laugh.
She has spent some helping family and friends, and the rest is for retirement, maybe a motor home to do some traveling, she said. She wants to get back to her crafts, fix some things around the house and take it easy, especially since having a pacemaker implanted in March.
“There’s a lot of nice people out there, I have learned that,” Klein said. “And to ignore the negative people.”