PowerSchool SIS 21.4.0.0

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PowerSchool SIS version 21.4.0.0 is available as of May 5, 2021. When the installers are available for download, an announcement will be posted on the PowerSchool SIS Release Notification page on PowerSchool Community.

Learn more about the PowerSchool 21.4.0.0 release in the PowerSchool Insider.

The New Experience introduced in PowerSchool SIS version 20.4.0.0 is now the only interface available for the PowerSchool SIS Admin and PowerSchool SIS Teacher portals. Any customers who previously opted to disable the New Experience will automatically transition to the updated interface with the 21.4.0.0 release.

Learn more about the New Experience features and options.

Customizations might be affected by the New Experience and may need to be adjusted. Technical Contacts can find Developer resources for the New Experience on the PowerSchool Developer site.

New Features

Feature	Description	Learn More
Asset Tracking	This feature allows you to track school property, such as books, eBooks, consumables, and electronics. Administrators can: Define assets in three categories: books, eBooks, and equipment. Each asset type has a customized set of fields appropriate for the item, though the page is extensible to add other fields. Check-in/check-out items to students, view each student's checked-out items by serial number and condition and track items and their condition. Scanners are supported throughout. Assign books to courses, allowing them to mass assign books to a student, and see currently checked-out items. Scanners are supported throughout. Inventory items maintain an ownership history so that admins can track an item's condition and ownership over time. Export all asset or inventory records using new Asset Tracking PowerSchool Data Sets in the Data Export Manager. Add, update and delete inventory records using Data Import Manager. Teachers can: Check-in/check-out items to their students within PowerTeacher Pro.	Asset Tracking PowerTeacher Pro - Asset and Textbook Tracking
Graduation Plan Enhancements	Additional functionality is now available for Graduation Plans that allow intermixed requirement group types that support more complex logical graduation requirements and an improved user interface. Administrators can: Add complex graduation requirements, such as the student must complete either test A with an 80 or course B with a C+, using intermixed requirement groups. Promote Historic Graduation Plans into new advanced Graduation Plans with improved features and user interface. Admins are encouraged to promote their Historic Graduation Plans to the advanced Graduation Plan format. These historic plans are converted into the new advanced format with all requirements and assigned students in place. View progress for all plans if students are enrolled in historic plans and the new advanced plans. Student Graduation Progress is updated to support the new types of requirements introduced in 20.11 and 21.4. The group function for Graduation Progress Summary is updated to support the new plans.	Graduation Plan
Enhanced Health	Additional functionality is now available for importing and exporting health-related information. Administrators can: Use import/export to add, update, or delete immunizations and exemptions. Use import/export to add, update, or delete screenings and waivers.	Import Student Immunizations
Fitness Tracking for Teachers	This feature allows teachers of designated courses to complete fitness tests for their students. Administrators can: Choose to enable fitness tracking for specific courses. Import/export test results, including fitness tests, using Data Import Manager and Data Export Manager. Teachers can: Enter fitness results by section in the Teacher Portal. Review individual student results in the Teacher Portal.	Enter Individual Fitness Scores Enter Fitness Scores for a Class
PowerTeacher Pro - Minimum Assignment Value	This feature is available at the course, school, or section level in Grade Setup Preferences when enabled by a system administrator. Administrators can: Set a minimum percentage value for all assignments in a teacher's gradebook.	Minimum Assignment Value
PowerTeacher Pro - Student Observations	This feature allows teachers to make time-stamped notes on a student's behavior or classwork with PowerTeacher Pro. Administrators can: Choose to allow teachers to escalate these as incidents in the Incident Management system. Incidents created by teachers appear in Incident Management in the PowerSchool Admin portal with the Incident Type of 'Teacher Referral.'	Student Observations Teacher Incident Referrals

Enhancements

Product Area	Description	Learn More
PowerSchool Admin - Accessibility	Several improvements have been made to improve accessibility within the PowerSchool application.
PowerSchool Admin - Enhanced Health	Continued improvements to the enhanced Health Module. Nurses can: See when a student is absent on the daily log to prevent a nurse from looking for a student that won't be at their appointment. Select multiple treatments, assessments, visit reasons, procedures, and outcomes to properly document the office visit for the student. Edit a monitoring schedule and have it update any future records. Copy a health plan for a student from one academic year to another to maintain their records and service level without affecting the records from the preceding years. Eliminate duplicate health concerns with an updated logic on health concerns to disallow two records for the same health concern with overlapping date ranges. Exclude a Vaccine Dose from the compliance calculations - used when a student has received a dose of a given vaccination too soon and requires an additional dose (beyond the normally required number of doses). In this scenario, the dose given too soon can be excluded, and it will not be factored into the compliance calculation.	Office Visits Health Data Grid
PowerSchool Admin - New Schoology Plugin	A new plugin has been added for the Schoology LMS integration. This plugin is currently being used in testing deeper integrations with Schoology and should not yet be enabled by customers. Keep an eye on the Schoology Release Notes, the PowerSchool SIS Product Updates in the Community, and Schoology's Help Documentation for information about when this plugin can be enabled.
PowerSchool Admin and Teachers - Updated Icons	The icons used for the student alerts have been updated with a new look and colors in PowerSchool Admin, the Teacher Portal homepage, Substitute homepage, and teacher attendance pages.	Teacher Portal
PowerSchool Admin - Improved Attendance Entry for Meeting Attendance	This enhancement changes the behavior of the dropdown menu in meeting attendance to reduce clicks and make data entry faster.

Resolved Issues

Product Area	Description	Reference
PowerSchool Admin - Accessibility	Improvements have been made to support accessibility using the JAWS screen reader within the PowerSchool Admin portal.	PSF-44948
PowerSchool Admin - Attendance	In some cases, when utilizing the Attendance Change function, some errors appear in the logs. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-46350
PowerSchool Admin - Attendance	In rare instances, the Attendance Change group function may incorrectly report that changes have been saved successfully and without error or warning. This issue occurs in cases where a preference value is set to an unexpected value. This issue is now resolved. Logging has been added to report if this data condition occurs.	PSF-43927
PowerSchool Admin - Attendance	When using the Google Chrome browser, selecting an Attendance Code from the Seating Chart may not save the selected value. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-44867
PowerSchool Admin - Customizations	Some PowerSchool customizers were experiencing a race condition when customizing the New Experience. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-44695
PowerSchool Admin - Customizations	Using the ~[x:userid;guardianid] tag on a custom page outside the Guardian protected context may result in the display of unexpected data. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-44394
PowerSchool Admin - Data Access Tags (DAT)	In some cases, attendance DATs such as attpointsperiod may return values such unexpected values. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-15745
PowerSchool Admin - Fees	School Fees that are marked as pro-ratable are not applied as expected in PowerSchool 20.11.x. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-44863
PowerSchool Admin - Health Management Dashboard	The health management page displays students as not compliant when their immunizations have an expired exemption status. This issue is now resolved. The students are displayed as exempt only when their immunizations have valid exemption status.	PSSR-260824
PowerSchool Admin - Health Management Dashboard	The Health Management Dashboard tiles do not match the number of records extracted for the vaccine on that tile. This issue is now resolved. The Health Management Dashboard page now pulls records equal to the count displayed on the tile for each vaccine for all Immunization modes - Not Compliant, Compliant, Exempt, Not Recorded.	PSSR-254450
PowerSchool Admin - Historical Grades	When accessing the Historical Grades page, the currently selected school name may show the name of the current student's home school instead of the expected name. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-44438
PowerSchool Admin - PowerPack Health Migration	Some customers reported unique key errors when migrating from PowerPack Health to Enhanced Health. These issues are now resolved.	PSF-41974
PowerSchool Admin - PowerScheduler	Upon completing the PowerScheduler Copy Master Schedule function, the School Year in Years and Terms may be incorrectly set to 2001-2002 instead of 2021-2022. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-46394
PowerSchool Admin - PowerScheduler	In some instances, attempts to commit a schedule in PowerScheduler result in an error message indicating duplicate sections found. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-32223
PowerSchool Admin - System	In some cases, a memory leak related to Attendance functions can occur. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-46200
PowerSchool Admin - System	With this release, the Data Restriction Framework (DRF) will evaluate security around certain URL parameters.	PSF-21562
PowerSchool Admin - Term Selector	When the PowerSchool New Experience is enabled, the Term selector only showed the first 100 terms. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-43878
PowerSchool Teacher - Gradebook	For some countries, an error occurred when launching PowerTeacher Pro at the start or end of daylight savings time. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-44372
PowerTeacher Pro - Term Locks	Under certain circumstances, term locks would apply the day before their set date. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-38183
PowerTeacher Pro - Student Name Sorting	Under certain circumstances, students whose last name includes an accent mark were not sorting alphabetically. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-39184
PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook - Slow Loading Time	Under certain circumstances, PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook loaded slowly for teachers with several classes that have multiple co-teachers. This issue is now resolved.	PSF-34417

Known Issues

Issue	Description	Reference
PowerSchool - Server	An issue has been identified in the PowerSchool SIS 21.4.0.0 release that prevents PowerSchool SIS from successfully starting when one or more mapped drives are defined for the PowerSchool component and none of the drives are marked as a data folder. Further details are available on the PowerSchool Community article titled 21.4 Single Node with Sharepoints where none are set to be PS Data Drive.	PSF-47640
PowerSchool Admin - Assets	If users create Asset Format codesets, create items using those codesets, and then change the original codesets' Alt codes to a different value, they can encounter unexpected behavior related to checking items in or out, creating new items using those codes, or editing existing items using those codes. To avoid this, users should not change the Alt 1 value after creating inventory using that value.	PSF-47144
PowerSchool Admin - Assets	Due to a finite number of columns that display on the Asset Inventory page, if a user adds assets with similar attributes, the user can't easily differentiate when looking at the books in Inventory. This means the user needs to select each asset to ensure inventory is added to the correct one.	PSF-46994
PowerSchool Admin - Assets	When creating multiple inventory items, the user will receive an error if they include a blank row in the list of inventory tags. To resolve, remove the blank row.	PSF-46834
PowerSchool Admin - Health	In change history for office visits, the 5 new multi-select fields will show multi-select as the field name instead of the actual name of the field.	PSF-43467
PowerSchool Admin - Historic Graduation Plans	When running the data capture process as part of the version promotion for a large number of students, a timeout may occur resulting in an error. The version promotion and student association processes are not affected, and the data capture process may still be running in the background. The psj-runtime log will indicate when the Data capture process has been completed.	PSF-47457
PowerSchool Admin - Inventory Mass Assign	Using the Inventory Mass Assign group function and assigning by a class displays the abbreviation for the period instead of the period number.	PSF-46585
PowerSchool Admin - Server List	As of PowerSchool 20.11.0.0 the Server List for PowerSchool SIS deployed as a server array may not display the correct state of a node. It may incorrectly display the state of a node as running, even when it is not available.	PSF-45668
PowerTeacher Pro - Admin Users Cannot Use Asset Tracking	Read-only admin users are unable to use Asset Tracking in PowerTeacher Pro. Admin users should use the Asset Tracking features in the Admin portal.	PSF-46999
PowerTeacher Pro - Checking-out/in Inventory	Under certain circumstances, when a teacher attempts to check in or check out a material assigned to another school, the teacher user may be logged out of PowerTeacher Pro.	PSF-46410

Removed Features/Future Deprecation

Feature	Description	Reference
PowerTeacher Gradebook	PowerTeacher Gradebook will be removed from PowerSchool SIS with the 22.4 release. To ensure that teachers can start using the more advanced features in PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook when you update PowerSchool SIS, make a plan to transition to PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook by the beginning of the 2022-2023 School Year.	Moving to PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook

PowerSchool Components

PowerSchool SIS is comprised of several software components, each versioned independently from one another. This allows for greater flexibility of component updates as new features and bug fixes become available. Some updates may include dependencies between components. These dependencies will be communicated and built into the component update installers to prevent PowerSchool SIS from being misconfigured. The following table identifies the version number for each PowerSchool SIS component in this release compared to the previous release:

Component	Version Number
	20.11.3.0	21.4.0.0
PowerSchool SIS Server	20.11.2.0	21.4.0.0
PowerTeacher Gradebook	2.8.0.24	2.8.0.25
ReportWorks	1.5.1.34	1.5.1.35
PowerScheduler	3.0.2	3.0.2
Oracle	12.2.0.1	12.2.0.1
State Reporting	21.2.2.0	21.5.1.1
Report SDK	1.24.0.0	1.25.0.0
Amazon Corretto Java	1.8u262	1.8u262