Every Wednesday instead of having an extended homeroom, the 15 minute slot of time is now on a different day each week. The reasons, according to BMS administration, are many.

Although it may confuse students when planning out what mornings to study for what, the change in schedule makes it so time isn’t taken away from classes every week.

Mrs. Jacquelin Mellin, vice-principal of Bedford, said, “The connections schedule distributes the loss of time more equally across all days of the week.”

Instead of missing about five minutes of every class students have before lunch on Wednesday, the new system rotates, so the loss of time does not add up significantly. This benefits those classes like health, engineering, or drama that students had only once a week. If that day was Wednesday, students were getting less time to learn in these classes.

This new system specifically benefits those teachers who work at both Bedford and Coleytown Middle School. According to Mrs. Mellin, there are some teachers specifically in the language department who work at both middle schools and the timing of homeroom needed to change to suit their schedules.
Now, students might be wondering, what is going to happen to vertical teaming? Mrs. Mellin says they plan on setting up a new system maybe after school for students of all grades to do activities based on common interests. Based on the feedback from the students, they didn’t like being placed in a room with a random group of older and younger kids. I think we can all agree it was a little intimidating and awkward.

Although, the change in schedule has many benefits for the teachers, there are many students who feel differently about the subject matter.

Jackie Zinn, a seventh grader at Bedford, states, “I am the type of person who likes to plan out everything in advance. If I couldn’t finish my homework or if I needed to study more, it was nice to rely on those 15 minutes before class began. Now that I don’t know when connections is, studying is a lot more time consuming.” Those few minutes were necessary for many who needed the extra time to work.