Rudolf Steiner School students plea for NBN to be made a priority
CONSTANT internet dropouts are causing grave problems for teachers, students and staff at the Central Coast Rudolf Steiner School.
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CONSTANT internet dropouts are causing grave problems for teachers, students and staff at the Central Coast Rudolf Steiner School.
As they struggle to complete lessons and run the school office, the nearby Ronkana Cemetery on the other side of the school oval and surrounding businesses in the area can access the NBN.
The ongoing problem with a lack of NBN services prompted Year 9 students to write a protest letter to Dobell federal Labor MP Emma McBride as part of their studies.
This led to Year 9 student Arabella Zocher making a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on the NBN, which held a hearing on the Central Coast earlier this month.
“It was good to get our little voice heard,” Arabella said.
“When I went to the hearing, they said they will personally email NBN to see if we could become a priority. You would think schools should be a priority.
“There are 300 of us that come here every day to learn. The cemetery on the other side of the oval has it and we don’t. It’s ridiculous.”
The school is using a Wi-Fi dish through its service provider, however, with a limited 10 megabits per second, which is the maximum bandwidth available to it.
NBN offers speeds of up to 100 megabits per second.
Arabella said it had become impossible for two classes using technology to run at the same time.
“In some classes when we need to watch videos, they take too long to load or just cut out, which messes up the lesson,” she said.
“It ends up putting a lot of stress on us. Work we plan to do at school we sometimes have to do at home.”
The problems started this year, when the Fountaindale school allowed students from Year 7 to bring their own laptops to class.
Rudolf Steiner is on the Ourimbah Exchange, while surrounding businesses are on the Berkeley Vale Exchange.
The school said it had been informed by an NBN technician that the service would be up and running by 2020, however, the coverage could be weak due to old lines in the exchange.
“We are in the dark and that’s the difficulty. There’s no definitive answer about what, and when,” deputy principal Tiffany Reynolds-Flannery said.
Office staff are dealing with phone dropouts, as well as problems with the online rollcall system, evacuation system, student records and absentee text message system, which confirm a student’s absence with parents via text message.
In the classrooms, teachers have stopped using some online programs, including the popular Mathletics.
“It’s a nightmare trying to incorporate 21st century in the classroom without reliable internet access,” Ms Reynolds-Flannery said.
Year 9 student Mackenzie Platt said it made life harder in the classroom.
“Sometimes we have videos we need to watch to understand lessons and we can’t watch them, which makes it hard to know what we are doing,” Mackenzie said.
The option for the school to have a dedicated line from the Berkeley Vale Exchange would cost $60,000.
MP CALLS FOR ACTION
Dobell federal Labor MP Emma McBride is calling for urgent action to connect Central Coast Rudolf Steiner School to the NBN.
Ms McBride, who received letters from the school’s students about their internet woes, said it is vital that they are given every opportunity to succeed.
“We need action now. Why aren’t schools a top priority for the NBN rollout?” she said. “Why are local students left behind because their school can’t access the NBN? This has to be fixed.”
A spokeswoman for NBN said the network is currently carrying out works to provide the school with access to the service.
“We expect this will be possible early in the new year, well ahead of the 2020 rollout deadline. In the meantime, the existing phone and internet services will continue to operate,” the spokeswoman said.
She said there are a small proportion of premises in areas that are more difficult to connect from an engineering perspective.
“It may be that a premise is too far from existing network assets meaning the fibre needs to be brought closer in order to deliver the Government’s mandated minimum whole speed of 25/5Mbps.”
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