As Yogi Berra is reported to have said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Foolish, too, most likely, but here goes with some ideas about how things will have changed after COVID-19 is under control.

Whenever that may be. Remember, Yogi also said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

As we emerge from the pandemic, we’ll try like the devil to return to the normality we knew before COVID. Send the kids to school every day, see people we haven’t seen in more than a year, attend games, shows, movies. Just as before. May not happen.

No activity has received more attention during the pandemic than schools, with the possible exception of nursing homes. While some schools struggle still to try to teach kids, wherever they may be, others are planning for how they’ll look come fall.

Schools face thousands of tough decisions about promoting kids to the next grade. Some 3 million pupils have gone missing — that is, they aren’t in class and aren’t turning in their online work. They may be the kids who need the most help in school, too. In Maine, enrollment is down by about 7,000 students (out of 182,000 who are school age) — more than in any other recent year.

Some of those, according to reports, are pre-kindergartners who never enrolled, and some turned to home-schooling and to private schools that stayed open.

Among pupils who weren’t “lost,” performance fell. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that “A national study of reading skills … found that as of late fall, second graders were 26 percent behind where they would have been, (without) the pandemic, in their ability to read aloud accurately and quickly. Third graders were 33 percent behind.”

As COVID slowly fades, then, do teachers just pass pupils through to the next level and hope for the best? Do they go case-by-case and advance some kids but not all? Do they develop a new screening method to evaluate pupils’ readiness to move up? And how do their decisions sit with the parents who learn their kids need to stay back a year?

Already, I’ve seen articles suggesting schools pass every kid through and cope with the result as best they can. That wouldn’t please the fifth-grade teacher with kids in her class who have completed only third-grade work. Other articles suggest promoting no kid who hasn’t completed acceptable work all year. That wouldn’t please parents whose kids tried to keep up using the less-than-perfect online tools.

However it comes out, the American Rescue Plan put forth by President Biden will pour tons of federal money into the schools. Maine child-care providers, schools and colleges will get up to $657 million, the Sun Journal reported Tuesday: $123 million for child-care providers and Head Start, $411 million for K-12 schools and $123 million for colleges, half of it in direct grants to students.

Does that mean that local school budgets won’t rise this year? We’ll see.

A lingering question is what we will have learned from more than a year of trying to teach online some days, in classrooms some days, and at safe distances all days.

Socially, when do we resume hugging or shaking hands with friends we run into on the street, in restaurants, at movie houses? Do we follow the European idea of issuing “vaccination passports” to everyone who gets immunized?

Can’t you just see it now? “Hey, Jude, long-time no-see. You been vaccinated? Got a paper to prove it? Oh, yeah. Hey, man, c’mere. Gimme a hug.” Or, “No passport? Sorry, dude, let’s just bump elbows.”

Early on, many people could work at home. They could, as athletes say when a player hasn’t done her best, simply “mail it in.” Almost literally. Many, it was reported, would never go back to the office. Just look at all the time saved from commuting. All the time we can put into productive work. New York City real estate was in free-fall for fear office towers would become empty silos.

Now, reports differ. “When can we go back to the office?” Or, “I miss working elbow-to-elbow with (fill in the blank).” Or, “I was a lot more productive when I could bounce ideas off my co-workers.”

In Maine, we’ve seen a bit of an influx of out-of-staters buying houses so they can “tele-commute” to work. They likely won’t return to offices in Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio. But we don’t know how many of them exist or how many Maine winters they are good for.

In the meantime, entertain offers on grandma’s house when she enters the nursing home. Somewhere is an out-of-stater who believes she wants to live here and work there.

Bob Neal is glad to be done with the hard choices facing school boards but he’s sad he couldn’t be at the America East women’s basketball championship yesterday in Orono. Neal can be reached at [email protected].