All Bedford County, Virginia Schools will close Wednesday after a high school student who was hospitalized for more than a week with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection has died.

All 21 schools will close for cleaning to keep the bacterial infection from spreading.

The school officials are also allowing students to check out early Tuesday. About 150 of the 11-hundred students have already checked out.

Ashton Bonds, 17, a senior at Staunton River High School, died Monday after being diagnosed with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

His mother, Veronica Bonds told the AP, "I want people to know how sick it made my son."

Bonds was diagnosed a week ago and placed in intensive care and he died around 5:00 Monday evening at Roanoke Memorial.

Staph infections, including the serious MRSA strain, have spread through schools nationwide in recent weeks, according to health and education officials.

The infections spread in gyms and locker rooms, where athletes, suffering from cuts or abrasions, share sports equipment. Bonds played football last year but was not playing this season.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is an isolate of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus characterized by antibiotic resistance to all penicillins, including methicillin and other narrow-spectrum â-lactamase-resistant penicillin antibiotics.

MRSA was discovered for the first time in 1961 in the UK, but it is now widespread in the hospital setting.

MRSA is commonly termed a superbug.