Pamela Wilson and Michael Martin Reflect on Increased Costs to Maintain Children’s Education

Story By: Bruce Poinsette

Illustration By: Desarea Guyton

Many of Pamela Wilson and Michael Martin’s peers have reported costs going down since the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lake Oswego couple can’t say the same. Their 4-year-old son used to go to daycare in LO, but in order to maintain his daycare routine once the Lake Oswego School District option closed down, they had to move to a facility in West Linn, a 20 minute drive away. Meanwhile, the couple’s 9-year-old daughter switched to LOSD’s hybrid learning model, splitting time between online learning and in-person sessions that the family had to supplement with tutoring in Tualatin. Having the children home for significantly more hours in the  day has also increased electricity, water and heating bills. Nonetheless, Martin says the biggest cost on the family has been psychological.

“I think the biggest cost we had was the emotional stress,” he says.

Martin says the pandemic has been especially hard on Wilson and their daughter, who participates in TAG and Spanish Immersion and is diagnosed with ADHD. Wilson adds that the change to online schooling presented a number of issues in terms of lack of teacher feedback, engaging lessons and socialization opportunities.

“It probably took us five weeks to figure out how many [Google] classrooms she actually had to manage,” says Wilson. “For the first five weeks, none of her extra work was done. So we had to spend a week of tears and crying to get her caught up.”

Both Wilson and Martin are tech industry professionals and the adjustment to having the children at home has put a strain on their work as well. Prior to the pandemic, Wilson worked from her office and traveled out of town for one week a month. While Martin was accustomed to working remotely, juggling work and watching after his son especially were difficult adjustments.

“He was at home with no distractions,” says Martin. “He’s not a child who spends all day watching TV. He wants to interact with you. I was struggling to keep up with work. My job has never really been 8-5 to begin with. But it was starting to really become worse as far as being productive throughout the day.”

Wilson and Martin also had to juggle and negotiate their own meeting times. Martin says it sometimes felt like an argument over whose meeting was more important.

One of the saving graces, they agree, is that they realized early on that the pandemic was going to be a long term issue. As a result, they decided to make space, especially in their backyard and garage, for everyone to exercise and engage in self care. Wilson says she even started relishing trips to the grocery store, bringing headphones to accentuate the experience.

“It was the only time away,” she says.

Wilson and Martin have a hard time imagining how their parents would’ve dealt with COVID-19. Their upbringings were very different from that of their children.

Gen X kids by their own admission, they spent a lot of time on their own. The idea of getting a tutor would’ve been foreign to Wilson’s father, she says. Martin adds, “We were the typical latchkey kids. We came home and fended for ourselves. Right now, even though we live in a great neighborhood, it stresses me out that my daughter has to walk a block and a half to the bus stop.”

When Wilson and Martin envision childcare in an ideal world, they see programs that are available to all children and include foreign language immersion and diverse classrooms, both in terms of teachers and students. Their daughter was enrolled at an LO French Immersion school where many of the teachers were Black immigrants but the students were still overwhelmingly white. Prior, she was at a Northeast Portland daycare with a diverse classroom. Wilson and Martin envision no longer having to choose between one experience or the other.

“There’s always a tradeoff,” says Wilson.