It has to be difficult to be a school in the pandemic. Sure, there are lots of other institutions working hard to figure out what’s happening and what to do about it. Hospitals, nursing homes, churches. Even grocery stores and baseball teams have been in turmoil because of covid-19. But has anything been tugged in different directions the way schools have? They are responsible for educating kids. They are also charged with keeping them safe. Those goals are hard to reconcile with each other when one side says children should be at their desks, learning about fractions and William Shakespeare, and the other says they should be as far apart as possible to keep the coronaviruses from hopscotching through the room.