A year later, bullied bus monitor teaches kindness

No new carpet or furniture for the home she's lived in for 46 years. No fancy car in the driveway.

After being gifted a life-changing sum following a school bus bullying episode seen around the world a year ago, former bus monitor Karen Klein, 69, says she really hasn't changed all that much.

Sure, the "Today" show mug she drinks coffee from reminds her of the widespread media attention her story brought, and the occasional stranger wants to snap her picture.

She also retired, something the widow couldn't afford before.

But Klein, who drove a school bus for 20 years before spending three years as a monitor, remains as unassuming as she was before learning firsthand how the kindness of strangers can trump the cruelty of four adolescent boys.

"It's really amazing," Klein said at her suburban Rochester home, shocked at the outpouring prompted by a cellphone video of her being ridiculed, sworn at and threatened by four seventh-graders last June.

"Unless you have something nice to say, don't say anything at all," Klein tells them.

One boy taunts: "You don't have a family because they all killed themselves because they don't want to be near you." Klein's oldest son committed suicide more than a decade ago.

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," she said.

Sidorov has called it "ridiculously more than I expected."

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.

She has spent some helping family and friends, and "the rest is under lock and key" for retirement, and 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 are other people who it would probably change dramatically," said Klein's daughter, Amanda Klein-Romig. "But for her, no, everything's the same pretty much."

Klein has been to Boston, Toronto and other cities to promote her foundation and participated in a WNBA anti-bullying event with the New York Liberty in Newark, N.J.

"There's a lot of nice people out there, I have learned that," Klein said. "And to ignore the negative people."

Klein has met with one of the boys who bullied her. He and his parents came to her home to apologize. The other three sent typed apologies, which she said struck her as less sincere.