The Wallowa School District, like Enterprise and Joseph, is planning to resume school in its classrooms this fall, but also is wary that those plans could change. The schools will see some significant modifications in scheduling, classroom spacing and even recess as they adjust to stay safe in the shadow of COVID-19.

Nobody seems eager to gauge Gov. Kate Brown’s latest COVID-19-related mandates draconian, and while such a description would be a bit over the top, the reality is the restrictions announced by the governor last week regarding school reopenings are constrictive.

The governor OK’d a resumption of in-person instruction this fall but the threshold to do that is significantly lower than expected and many counties — especially ones in Eastern Oregon — simply will not be able to meet the new standards.

A county where a school district is located must report 10 or fewer COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents for three weeks in a row and have 5% or less positive tests per week. The state must also have 5% or fewer positive tests under the new mandate.

As with just about everything to do with COVID-19 — and anything else for that matter — the governor’s restrictions will surely be politicized, if they haven’t already. As a virus, it would seem at first glance as if COVID-19 was a subject incapable of being politicized but, leave it to modern American society to do just that. That politicization makes it more difficult to achieve crucial steps needed to protect the welfare of us all.

That said, the new mandates are a one-sized-fits-all method that is, as usual, unworkable in Eastern Oregon.

That’s because Eastern Oregon is a sparsely populated region where school districts — if there are more than one in a county — are often separated from each other by miles of sagebrush, desert or timber and mountains.

An outbreak could be urgent in say, Baker City, but make no impact on the Pine Eagle School District in Halfway.

While the need for the governor’s new mandates are clear in such counties as Marion or Washington, the necessity of the restrictions seems out of place in a place like Wallowa County.

What is a better idea is to use the new restrictions as a starting point on the road to the creation of a flexible plan that can be tweaked to meet the needs of individual counties in places like Eastern Oregon. Low in population, most counties in Eastern Oregon don’t face the same type of risk as an urban jurisdiction. There are exceptions, of course, such as neighboring Umatilla County or Malheur County, which sits on the Oregon-Idaho border and shares employment and residents with the Gem State and is currently in the middle of a serious outbreak.

Overall, through, low population density and vast distances between towns and schools in Eastern Oregon mean a more flexible plan should be developed by state officials.