Bullied bus monitor: What will happen to those nasty kids? (+video)

Bullied bus monitor, 68-year-old Karen Klein, tried to ignore the profanity and insults thrown at her by middle school students. But, unless there are real changes made to school system policies, nothing is going to happen to those nasty kids.

By Stephanie Hanes, Correspondent / June 21, 2012

Bullied bus monitor Karen Klein ignored verbal abuse from Athena Greece Middle School students this week, and video of the incident went viral on YouTube. What will be done to stop those nasty students? Nothing, unless parenting and school system policies change.

Courtesy of Laidlaw Education Services

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If you’re like a bazillion other people across the world this morning, you might have caught glimpse of a YouTube video showing an elderly bus monitor sitting through an absurd amount of verbal abuse from a group of middle schoolers.

Stephanie Hanes

Correspondent

Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.

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The 10-minute, brutal video, which was posted Monday and has since gone viral, shows Karen Klein trying to ignore profanity-laced insults and even some physical threats, including the suggestion that her children should commit suicide.

In the good news department, an online fund set up for Klein up on the international fundraising site indiegogo.com (“Karen… deserves a vacation!”) has raked in more than $140,000. Turns out most people find the cruel, relentless taunting of a grandmother disgusting.

Which, I’ll admit, is a relief. Because otherwise this story would just have me depressed for days.

Still, good intentions of the masses aside, the story of Klein should leave some pretty sobering questions – not the least of which is: what’s going to happen to those nasty kids from the Athena Middle School in Greece, New York?

And yes – I just called the kids nasty. I didn’t call them “confused,” or “poorly monitored,” or “immature,” or even “making bad decisions in a group environment.” Because it might just be possible that the culture of excuse making for children – the all-too-common parental belief that nothing their little one does is wrong, or at least is someone else’s fault – helps contribute to an environment where a group of young teens can giggle together while tormenting a senior citizen.

So, I might add, does our public school system.

Now this is a big one – too complex, surely, for a column this morning. But think about it – there’s clearly a problem when a school system basically can’t do anything about a group of middle school kids acting like little monsters. Sure, there have been the requisite comments about the kids’ behavior going against “codes of conduct.” (Um, yeah.) There was talk about “consequences.”

But really, what’s the school going to do? Expelling the kids would send the message – to them, to society, to the parents who then will just have to figure out what to do with a child not fit to exist in a publicly-funded setting with other people. No, we’ve decided as a society that schools can’t have that stick.

So what else to do? Greece school board president Julie VanOrman had an idea – make the incident a “teachable moment.” (Gag. Really?)

"This (incivility) is a problem not just in this district but of the nation, and what are we actually doing about it," she said. "What are we all going to do to make sure this doesn't happen on another bus in another school district tomorrow?" she told the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle.

Nothing. We’re all going to do nothing.

Unless there are real changes in parenting, real changes in school system policies, we will do nothing to make sure this doesn’t happen on another bus tomorrow. And next time it might not go up on YouTube.