Schools were open in most of the world, even during the pandemic. So that's not shielding their children from the effects of a deadly pandemic; it's shielding them from a uniquely bad policy that was completely self-inflicted and unjustified.

My province had a curfew (another bad idea, to be fair), and even then we still kept schools open (after the first 2 months of the pandemic, and that was longer than a lot of other places). Keeping them closed for more than a year had nothing to do with keeping people alive, or we would have seen massive differences between children death rates in the US vs. the rest of the world.