While not making major changes to its back-to-school plan, the Seneca Valley School Board approved revisions to the district's health and safety plan at a virtual meeting Monday.

Those changes to the state-mandated return-to-school document were “very, very minor” revisions, school board president Jim Nickel said, mainly concerning hand sanitizing on buses, updates to a parent survey results section and bringing the document more into compliance with the latest state Department of Education guidance.

Superintendent Tracy Vitale said the district would be unable to provide hand sanitizer on school buses due to guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, and as such, students are asked to provide their own hand sanitizer in three-ounce or smaller bottles. According to Vitale, there could not be bottles of sanitizer larger than three ounces on buses.

“It's not that we weren't going to provide it, or that the bus companies weren't going to provide it,” Vitale said. “It was a regulation handed down by the Department of Transportation.”

The plan was further updated to reflect the education department's recent clarification of its masking guidance, namely that students may remove masks when eating or drinking 6 feet apart; when wearing one would create unsafe conditions or prohibit the operation of equipment or tasks; and during “face-covering breaks” of 10 minutes or less when adequately socially distanced.

Marie Palano, the district's director of analytics and federal programs, said the text of the plan was also updated to reflect that roughly 1,400 students would be in the district's cyber and hybrid schooling options, rather than the 1,500 the district expected when the plan was drafted.

Vitale also updated the board on changes made to the district's cyber learning options to, she said, make it better than it was last year.Among the changes was the addition of more than 20 elementary teachers to the district's full-time cyber program to aid in teaching the higher-than-expected number of online students.“Much to our surprise, we had a number of elementary students choose full-time cyber,” she said.The district also will now have mandated check-in times for full-time cyber students, where they can meet with their teachers in a one-on-one environment. Additionally, there will be times during which students have the option of talking with their teacher and other full-time cyber students in a virtual room to help facilitate the social side of learning.“I know of no other public school doing this and I know of no cyber charters doing this,” she said.