Realistically, covid is here for the forseeable future.
It's a fast-mutating pathogen (which I understand is typical of respiratory infections) and since about half of humans worldwide are vaccinated and half aren't, in a perfect environment to evolve resistance to vaccines (and the immune systems defences generally).
If covid were a worse infection, this would be really serious. But it isn't. It rarely kills people without pre-existing conditions (the biggest of which is old age). It's also getting less virulent: e.g. in the UK omicron has led to a big increase in infections, but not in deaths[1].
Scott Alexander calculated that it takes 52 person-months of lockdown to save one person-month of life[2]. This suggests to me that if lockdowns reduce quality of life by at least 2%, they are QALY-negative.
My conclusion from all this is that I don't think lockdowns should be compulsory. If people think the threat to themselves or family members is severe, by all means they can lockdown; but expecting everyone else to is wrong as lockdowns reduce overall utility.
Regarding schools, in this as in a lot of things vouchers would be a good system, then people who don't like how their state schools are run can walk away and take their kid's education money with them.
1: see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...