Biography | Bernadette Meehan — The Route 138 School That Graduated a Pleasantville Exchange Student

People treat a Wikimedia chief executive as a San Francisco appointment.

Bernadette Meehan reached that chair from a Catholic campus on Route 138 in Somers, New York.

She was born in the Bronx on 3 August 1975 and raised in Pleasantville, a few miles south of this pin.

The local Examiner later recorded the school path: Bedford Road School, Pleasantville Middle School, then John F. Kennedy Catholic High School.

The campus at 54 Route 138 opened in 1966 as the successor to St. Mary's High School in Katonah.

It remains an Archdiocese of New York preparatory school on a 64-acre site.

Meehan graduated with the class of 1993.

In the summer of 1992, between her junior and senior years, she traveled to Argentina through the Pleasantville International Association exchange program.

Some later summaries compress that season into a stay at Río Gallegos when she was sixteen.

The 2015 Examiner account is more precise about the timing: a summer placement between two years at this school.

The Spanish from that trip followed her into the Foreign Service and, three decades later, into the embassy in Santiago.

The building on this pin is a working school.

Treat the grounds as a campus, not a museum, and do not photograph students.

Photo: U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Official ambassador portrait, 2022.