By Shelby Brooks
Struggling with a poor internet connection, Tynong’s St Thomas Aquinas College is hoping to secure a $100,000 grant to help bring their teaching into the 21st century.
Relying on a residential internet connection with dismal download and upload speeds, teachers have struggled to deliver online learning to students during lockdown, principal Father Andrew Cranshaw said.
“Lockdown created difficulties in delivering our teaching services to the students,” he said.
“I suggested teachers stay home and use their own Wi-Fi connection as they’d have more success there than here.”
St Thomas Aquinas has applied for Project Halo, a grant scheme in which NetVault, SpaceX and Cisco collectively will gift a regional Australian school with $100,000 worth of telecommunications and technology.
NetVault’s solution utilises Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starlink high-speed satellite network technology to provide life changing internet access across the country from August this year.
“They’re our way out,” Fr Cranshaw said.
“It will get us to the 21st century to teach.
“We can’t even dream of it.”
Fr Cranshaw explained how local students had difficulty during home learning due to the poor internet in the town.
“A lot of our students also don’t have good internet at home or enough devices at home,” Fr Cranshaw said.
“One student had to climb to the top of a hill to get sufficient connection to download course work.
“Another family had to gather outside on the picnic table.”
Currently, the internet the school uses, which is the same across the town of Tynong, has a 20 megabyte per second download speed and a 5 megabyte per second upload speed.
“That would be fine for a little household, not for a whole residential area of 500 residents or a school with 265 students,” Fr Cranshaw said.
“100 megabytes per second upload speed is what we need to cope with 35 staff trying to teach all at the same time.
“Everything crashes even the phone line crashes sometimes.”
The rural school is only 20 minutes away from Pakenham.
“It’s a tiny little town- it’s fantastic, beautiful, green and quiet,” Cr Cranshaw said.
“The downside to that is we don’t have suitable internet connection out here.
“We approached NBN and government agencies to try see if they could help but they said Tynong doesn’t warrant commercial NBN connection, you’ll have to cope.
“We could pay between $300,000 and $400,000 for an NBN connection but unfortunately we don’t have that income.
“Financially, that would kill us.”
