'Just evil': Spotty internet an added stressor to virtual learning for rural Ontario students

This story is part of a CBC News series examining the stresses the pandemic has placed on educators and the school system. For the series, CBC News sent a questionnaire to thousands of education professionals to find out how they and their students are doing in this extraordinary school year. Nearly 9,500 educators responded. Read more stories in this series here. 

Some families in rural parts of Waterloo region and nearby counties in southern Ontario say unreliable internet access has made a difficult pandemic school year even more complicated.  

Seager Grubb, 15, and his sister Sarene Grubb, 18, who live near Wellesley, often face frozen computer screens and lengthy download times while taking classes online.

"It's hard to hear what my teacher is saying … It's just really frustrating," said Seager.

"It's really slow and takes a lot more time than it should," said Sarene. 

Unreliable internet access was also identified as a problem by respondents to a recent CBC questionnaire, which invited educators across Canada, including in Waterloo region and Wellington County, to detail their experiences.

"Many students also do not have adequate internet to effectively participate in lessons," wrote one local educator.

"Weak internet connections result in students and teachers not being able to clearly hear each other and of being 'frozen' frequently during lessons."

Another educator responded to the questionnaire by saying: "Doing online learning without technical resources is just evil.

"I have students going to [Tim Hortons] or [McDonald's] to work and attend because their brothers and sisters are using up all their limited bandwidth at home."

Local results from the survey show about 65 per cent of teacher respondents believe some students won't catch up academically, and more than half said fewer students are meeting their learning goals compared to a non-pandemic year.

How students are coping

Given that all students in the province are learning online during Ontario's current stay-at-home order that began in April, families in rural areas have had to find creative ways to cope.

For some blended households, the answer has been to send the kids to school at the home of the parent who has the best internet connection.

That was the solution a neighbour of the Grubbs, Karla Richards, landed on for her high-school-age son.

 "He would travel to his dad's house in Baden, where he had high-speed internet, and things were just a lot easier," said Richards. "Certainly if I was working from home, I could not work and he could not do school at the same time. So that was really frustrating."

Angel Reiner's family did the same. She has two stepsons who are both in their teenage years and typically spend Monday to Friday at their mom's house to finish their schoolwork. 

"We simply don't have a strong enough internet connection to support having them here for them to be able to do school," said Reiner, who recently moved to North Dumfries. 

"It's very frustrating because about five to seven minutes towards Kitchener, we can get a signal the same way, five to seven minutes to Cambridge, we can get a signal. It's just this little pocket."

East of Waterloo region in Puslinch, Jamie Kreutzwiser's strategy has been to simply buy as many internet subscriptions whenever possible. She now has three children — and three different internet providers.

"There should always be one, hopefully, or two that are reliable enough that they can get through their lessons," said Kreutzwiser, noting the bill works out to roughly $300 a month.

"It's not uncommon to hear someone yell across the house, 'What internet are you on?' Because they know that they have to find the one that the other person's not on, so they don't kick their sibling off."

Tanya Terpstra lives in Listowel, west of Waterloo region, with her husband and seven children, six of whom are trying to learn online.

Two of her children are using a hot spot provided by the school board. The rest of the family saves bandwidth by turning their cameras off wherever possible, and Terpstra does her part by scheduling Zoom meetings for the late afternoon — once school wraps up.

"We've had to be a little bit more creative," said Terpstra.

Although the families who spoke to CBC Kitchener-Waterloo have found ways to make online school work, they said it's an added stress that isn't needed during the pandemic. They hope better connections are coming soon. 

"There's plenty of families here that I know have younger children ... and they can't home-school their kids because they just can't get online," said Reiner. "What's the long-term effect on their learning?"

"There are children that don't have options to go to another parent's house," said Richards. "So I think rural areas need help and need some attention."

Investments coming, say governments

At a provincial level, the Ministry of Infrastructure told CBC Kitchener-Waterloo it will invest $4 billion to help connect every region in Ontario to reliable broadband by the end of 2025.

The 2021 federal budget also includes  $1 billion for the Universal Broadband Fund, which a spokesperson described as "the single largest investment in broadband in Canada's history."

In Puslinch, the company Standard Broadband is planning a fibre internet expansion scheduled to wrap up this fall.

Closer to home in Waterloo region, new funding was announced last December through Southwestern Integrated Fibre Technology (SWIFT) to expand fibre-optic broadband services in rural areas of Waterloo Region, including Woolwich, Wellesley, Wilmot and North Dumfries.

The projects are expected to be completed between March and August 2022.

As for Seager and Sarene, they hope to find a solution well before then. 

"I'll be going to [Wilfrid Laurier University] in the fall," said Sarene. "Hopefully by then we'll have good Wi-Fi or will be in class."

This story is part of a CBC News series examining the stresses the pandemic has placed on educators and the school system. Read more in this series here.

Methodology:

CBC sent the questionnaire to 52,351 email addresses of school workers in eight different provinces, across nearly 200 school districts. Email addresses were scraped from school websites that publicly listed them. The questionnaire was sent using SurveyMonkey.

CBC chose provinces and school districts based on interest by regional CBC bureaus and availability of email addresses. As such, this questionnaire is not a representative survey of educators in Canada. None of the questions were mandatory, and not all respondents answered all of the questions. (Data analysis: Roberto Rocha and Dexter McMillan)