Students apologize to bullied bus monitor Karen Klein (VIDEO)

The middle school students in New York who taunted and bullied a 68-year-old bus monitor in a video that's gone viral online are apologizing for their words.

CNN's Anderson Cooper reported the apologies while interviewing Karen Klein on his show Thursday night.

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“I am so sorry for the way I treated you,” one of the students, named Josh, said in a statement. “When I saw the video I was disgusted and could not believe I did that.”

Another student, Wesley, said: "If that had happened to someone in my family, like my mother or grandmother, I would be really mad at the people who did that to them."

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Klein told Cooper was she hesitant to believe one of the students was sincere.

“Even if he wasn’t picking on me, it was something else,” she said. “So I just don’t think I would believe anything Josh had to say.”

It all started when one of the students uploaded a 10-minute video of the verbal assault to YouTube on Tuesday. Several students can be heard taunting Klein, a bus monitor for the Greece School District in Rochester, N.Y., who is ultimately driven to tears, ABC News reported.

A vacation fund for Klein set up by the website, indiegogo.com, has raised nearly $480,000 so far, exceeding the original $5,000 goal.

Klein said the whirlwind of kindness has been overwhelming, but urged people not to harm or threaten the kids involved, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported.

“We have a cellphone of one of the boys and he’s received more than 1,000 missed calls and more than 1,000 text messages threatening him,” Greece police Capt. Steve Chatterton told the Rochester newspaper. “Threats to overcome threats do no good.”