When the state Department of Health designated Butler County as having “substantial” COVID-19 transmission, it and the state Department of Education made an appeal to county schools: Move students online, at least partly.

In a meeting Monday between the Department of Education and the county's school superintendents, the department asked the administrators to shift schools to blended learning or go fully remote due to the increase of COVID-19 cases in the county.

While the agency made these recommendations, it noted that it wasn't a mandate and that districts retained local control over how schools operate.

But that came with a caveat, Mars Area School District Superintendent Mark Gross said, as the health department noted the Department of Education has the ability — although it has not yet wielded that power — to close schools due to the virus.

“They did basically tell us that the recommendation would be either a blended or remote learning model, but they did say that they're recommendations, not mandates, and that we need to continue to review our data locally to make the best decisions,” Gross said.

The Department of Education's recommendations to county schools while Butler was in the “moderate” level of transmission is identical to its current counsel.

Mars Area, Seneca Valley and Slippery Rock Area school districts have taken this new recommendation into account, with Seneca shifting its secondary students to its “cohort” model through Dec. 6; Mars closing its high school through Dec. 1; and Slippery Rock students learning remotely through at least Friday.

This is the first week in which the county has received the “substantial” designation, and the Department of Education views the first week of such a designation as a way to get the county back on track, Gross said.

“The first week is considered almost a warning that things have progressed in this manner, and Friday morning we're supposed to get more correspondence from them,” Gross said. “They did indicate that they'll make recommendations, but they believe they're local decisions.”

The three districts said they took into account local data in making their decisions, keeping true to the state government's belief in local autonomy.

At Monday's school board meeting, Seneca Valley Superintendent Tracy Vitale said the district's kindergarten through sixth grade schools did not have any significant level of COVID-19 cases and, as such, kept her recommendation to move just the three secondary schools to blended learning.

Gross noted a similar idea, saying his district's kindergarten through eighth grade transmission was virtually nonexistent, while the high school had five cases in the 14 days prior to Tuesday.

The districts' policies abide by the state's language this week, but the directives may change next week if the current viral trajectory continues.“If we go to a second week of substantial (transmission), they're going to recommend full remote, K through 12, for the entire district,” Vitale said.Slippery Rock students have been learning virtually since Nov. 5, when the district determined the number of students and teachers quarantined — not necessarily due to falling ill with the new disease, but because they had been identified as a “close contact” of an infected person — precluded meaningful learning.“We were operating at around 75% of our student population with in-person learning up until we had to go to remote last Thursday,” Superintendent Alfonso Angelucci said. “It comes down to, we need staff to teach and we need students to teach to.”Like Mars Area and Seneca, Slippery Rock will strongly consider the two state agencies' recommendations. “We were told that it was a recommendation, but given that experts in those two departments are recommending things, we're heeding that, for sure,” Angelucci said.

It's a double-edged sword, Angelucci and Gross said, that the state is leaving these decisions to school boards. On the one hand, local control is a hallmark of the state; on the other, it's a road to a decision no superintendent wants to make, even if it is ultimately the right choice.“Our parents rely upon us to be open and to educate their children. At the same time, our No. 1 responsibility, even under the school code, is student safety,” Gross said. “That's the balancing act we have.”School decisions remaining in local control is a change from the early days of the pandemic. Districts now also have more time to prepare for a possible move to remote learning as well as a more developed platform with more teachers familiar with the system.In Seneca Valley, teachers will livestream their classes to students who are learning from home, something for which some parents had petitioned the district when the cohort model was first implemented at the beginning of the school year. Mars students have that access too.“The good news is that we do have the option to do what we're doing at the high school at any given motion,” Gross said. “Our teachers can teach remotely live. They're not just posting lessons, they're doing (it) live.”As the county faces more and more COVID-19 cases, superintendents and school boards are brought closer to the tipping point of having to make the choice of whether to move online. For better or worse, it's one they will discuss together. “I think it's safe to say that every superintendent is dealing with the same looming question we are. You want to remain open, but you don't want to do it in a careless manner either,” Gross said. “We are talking virtually daily, and everybody has their own struggles, and they have their own levels of concern based on what's happening in their communities.”