Changes to the maximum gathering-size limits in Pennsylvania have a number of impacts at Warren County School District.

The most common and public is to spectators at athletic events.

For much of the season, outdoor events were limited to 250 total people in a facility, including players, coaches, officials, and spectators.

Indoors, the restrictions were even more significant. Limiting indoor gatherings to 25 meant there were times when not everyone on a team could be in the gym at the same time and spectators simply weren’t allowed in at all.

Those limits have eased, now based on occupancy limits rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, and the district is working on applying those limits to home playoff games, according to Superintendent Amy Stewart.

Even the school board’s activities are not back to normal yet.

At Monday night’s regular meeting of the board, Jeff Labesky asked “are our meetings going to go back to normal any time soon?”

The board has held its meetings in the board room at the central office in Russell as normal. However, that space cannot, within CDC guidelines, accommodate everyone – the public, some administrators, and even some board members having been joining the meetings virtually using Zoom.

Labesky’s concern has been addressed at the state level.

“It’s still a public meeting,” Superintendent Amy Stewart said. “We have to adhere to those rules.”

COVID-19 has also meant that, from the beginning of the year, students have been able to attend in one of three ways – in person (option 1), virtually through the Virtual Academy (option 2), and a hybrid approach that allows students to live stream their school days from home using software to be able to observe and participate in classes (option 3).

Students are not able to switch back and forth at will, but they can opt to switch from one method to another, giving the district a reasonable amount of time to make the adjustment.

At the start of the school year, about three-quarters of students returned in-person.

For a while, the breakdown remained fairly consistent with students moving from one option to another in roughly equal numbers.

At this point, more students are returning to school in-person.

“We have more movement from 2 and 3 going to 1 than any other,” Stewart said. “The most common thing that I am hearing is folks were waiting to see what was going to happen. In addition, folks thought virtual was going to be very easy. It’s a lot of work and it’s not as easy as some thought it was going to be.”

There have not been many cases of COVID among the students and staff of the district, but “it’s rare that we get a case that doesn’t impact us in some way, shape, or form.”

When someone is identified as having the virus, people in their household have to quarantine. If they live with a teacher or students, those people will not be in school for two weeks, Stewart said.

If the patient passes the virus to someone else in the household, the timeline resets, meaning students could be out of school for several weeks without contracting COVID-19.