March 11t was a day that Bedford students and staff will always remember. It was late in the day on Wednesday when Dr. Rosen announced that the school would be closed for at least two weeks. There were a variety of different thoughts on the news. Here is what some students said.
Levi Nevstad is an eighth grader who was in seventh grade at the time.

Here is what he remembers: “I heard the news in Science class with Mr. DeFichy. I was excited about having a possibly long break from schoolwork. I talked to a friend and we both agreed that we would have so much fun taking a break from everything.”
Similar to Levi, Christian Rinaldi who was also a seventh grader at the time had similar feelings about the day. “That day I was in health class. I heard Dr. Rosen on the loudspeaker. I was happy at the time because I could get home early and maybe have the next day off. I talked to my friend Daniel and asked if he wanted to come over to my house”.

Eighth Grade Purple pod teacher Mrs. Ruggiero had a different take on the topic. She remembers: “hearing loud cheering from the cafeteria when the news broke… At first I was sort of concerned for the health of the students. I also worried about how long I would be away. I talked to Mr. Cuccaro first about how they should have released the news at the end of the day so the students weren’t so hyper in their last two classes. That day I took almost everything with me and I remember forgetting my laptop charger. Just in case we would teach virtually, I had two weeks worth of lessons ready to teach.”

Here was Dr. Rosen’s thought process on the day. “On March 11, 2020, I received word from the central office late in the day, around 1:30 p.m. if memory serves. I made announcements over the PA for students to bring home enough school materials for an extended period of time from school, which we projected at two weeks. Truth be told, the announcement came as no surprise to me; we had already begun taking steps at BMS three weeks prior to the closing….. I recall being very proud of the steps the BMS/CMS leadership team took to prepare for closing and continuity of education and alerting the leadership team that although the closing was billed for two weeks, we would likely not be coming back to school this year based on observation of the pandemic overseas and we need to start planning accordingly. I also recall feeling sad and depressed for our middle school students since they had already been through so much upheaval with the merging of the two middle schools, which lasted two and a half years. My thinking was that this pandemic is serious, it’s real, it’s dangerous, it’s not going to go away anytime soon and we better plan for the upcoming school year accordingly.”

Looking back at this day, most students were probably psyched about having a possible two week break.
What they did not know is that they would be learning through a computer far longer than they had imagined.