Certainly the biggest social media story of the week has been that of Karen Huff Klein, the 68-year-old bus monitor working for the Athena Middle School District in Greece, New York, who was so brutally harassed by 7th-grade students on their second to last day of school. Apparently doing nothing but her job, sitting quietly and watchfully on the bus, Mrs. Klein became the target of horrific verbal abuse from four, 13-year-old students on their ride home. A student sitting nearby captured it all on his cell phone and then uploaded it to his Facebook page, from which it made its way to YouTube.
Once in the public domain:
Through posts on social media and the user-generated news site Reddit.com, word spread geometrically, leading to a fund drive created by Redditor, Max Sidorov, on the independent fundraising site indiegogo.com that began with a modest goal of $5,000 to help Klein take a nice vacation and scrub the foul memories of the last days of school from her mind.
Sidorov, a 25-year-old Toronto nutritionist and graduate of York University, who had experienced bullying himself when he first moved to Canada as a young boy from Ukraine, wrote:
His efforts have paid off in spades. Klein, a grandmother of eight, who only makes $15,506/year, now has $628,233 waiting for her that has been contributed by over 29,000 people, as of this writing on Saturday evening, June 23, 2012, at 8:50 pm. The fund has been growing exponentially ever since it was first established three days ago and the collection site will be up until Friday, July 20, 2012, at 11:59 PM PST.
Sidorov is ecstatic. He says:
Although this isn't the first time crowdsourcing has raised impressive amounts of money, even experts agree that
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project and author of "Networked: The New Social Operating System," calls the sheer volume of response to the Klein video "head-scratching." He comments:
I, for one, am glad that the boundaries to "this stuff" don't exist in Klein's case and that the fund raising efforts in response to the above video have gone viral across the world. I would like nothing better than to see Karen Klein become an Internet millionaire, while her tormentors are riding their bicycles to and from school because they've lost their privilege to ride the bus.
I'm normally a passive consumer of Internet news -- reading, watching and listening, but not acting; what I saw in that 10-minute video, however, spurred me into action. I've emailed the superintendent of public schools in Greece, New York, along with the principal of the Athena Middle School District from which these disgraceful kids hail, as well as the president of the Greece Central School District Board of Education. And, of course, I've contributed to Karen's fund.
A recent Huff Post Tech article entitled "How The Internet Saved The Bullied Bus Monitor," comments on how
It has certainly made a difference for Karen Klein, as you can see in this interview with Anderson Cooper below:
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