Karen Klein, a New York grandmother of eight was taunted so badly by students on a school bus she was monitoring that it drove her to tears. One of the students on the bus captured the 10-minute taunting on video and now she’s $166,000 richer.
Originally uploaded to Facebook and then YouTube the video has received more than 1.65 million views in the last 24 hours.
After many people began witnessing the video an online fundraising effort (click link for the fundraising page) was started to send Karen Klein on a much deserved vacation, an effort that so far has raised 166,514.
Talking to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle about the bullying incident Klein had stated:
“I was trying to just ignore them, hoping they would go away and it doesn’t work. Trust me, they didn’t go away.”
A second video was eventually discovered and the school district opened an active investigation to determine which kids were bullying Karen Klein.
Despite everything that has happened the victim insists “the kids weren’t always that bad” which explains why she didn’t personally report the incident. In fact nothing would have likely happened had the video not went viral on Wednesday and police were brought in to question kids on the bus.
Klein who is hearing impaired did not hear all the taunts that were captured on video. The grandmother makes $15,506 per year and is now considering taking her whole Family on a Disney Cruise.
The campaign for her vacation was started by a 25-year-old Reddit activist who said of the effort so far: “Maybe she could retire on this.”
Check out the first link in this post if you want to donate and help Karen Klein retire from her bullying work conditions.
In the meantime here’s the first bullying video that was uploaded to YouTube and eventually attracted millions of viewers:
[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/l93wAqnPQwk” width=”420? height=”315?]
UPDATE #1: The donations page has now raised more than $200,000!
UPDATE #2: The donations page has now raised more than $307,000!
UPDATE #3 : The donations page has now raised more than $630,000!
