What causes poor sync to certain performers using their IPAD?

hard to say. So you record your students, or just “chat”? In the first case I’d recommend to have a look at the Remote Latency setting and increase it to 2 or 2.5 seconds (it should be at least 1.5 seconds anyway). Second guess is to make sure that the student doesn’t run other (background) tasks accesing the internet. Finally make sure that upstream settings aren’t set too high.