GREAT FALLS — Great Falls Public Schools announced on Monday that Great Falls High School would enter a temporary remote learning period due to a COVID-19 outbreak in the school.
GFPS said “the number of confirmed active positive cases increased to over 35 individuals, staff and students.”
With fall sports season underway, however, GFPS director of athletics Mike Henneberg has assured that there will be no cancellations of games or practices - but there will be increased awareness of proper safety measures.
“[We will have] increased emphasis on the hygiene piece and using face coverings when we weren’t in immediately involved in activity or immediately recovering from activity,” Henneberg said.
For sports especially, navigating COVID is nothing new. For Henneberg and the Great Falls Public Schools, they had already planned on challenges in the first normal year back from last year’s abbreviated seasons.
“We knew from the beginning that this was going to be a continually fluid situation and there were times that we were going to have to adjust to what is going on in our schools, what is going on in our county and so on and so forth.”
For now, as students learn from home, sports like soccer, volleyball, golf and football are business as usual with the minor tweaks. There will be increased reminders to socially distance and mask up for spectators at the games as well as sanitization and masking when not playing and in close proximity of each other.
There are no cancellations this week for the Bison. The boys and girls soccer teams are at home against their crosstown rival Great Falls CMR Thursday evening. At that same time, volleyball will be up against Gallatin in the fieldhouse.
Lastly, Bison football takes on Billings West Friday night at Memorial Stadium.
