PowerSchool SIS 20.11.0.0

The enhancements to the Graduation Planner provide better flexibility and new capabilities for admins in designing graduation plans (Start Page > District Setup > Graduation Planner Setup). These features support ESSA compliance, and include the following:

• Ability to set minimum grade required for counting credit for a graduation plan. For example, a student will qualify for a High School Diploma if the student meets 40 credits but the student will qualify for High School Diploma with Academic Honors if the student meets 40 credits with a minimum grade of B in 5 subjects.
• Ability to set a minimum GPA for a graduation plan.
• Ability to set a composite test threshold. For example, earn a combined score of 1750 or higher on the SAT critical reading, mathematics, and writing sections and a minimum score of 530 on each. Currently, we can test for the min 530 on each part, but cannot simultaneously have a composite threshold of 1750 for the combined subtests.
• Ability to define multiple tests (or subtests) as options for a given requirement. A student can take one or more tests but doesn't have to take all. For example, the student can take either the ACT or SAT.
• Grad Planner setup pages, student pages, reports, and DATs, and the PowerSchool SIS Student and Parent portal support new capabilities where there is a dependency.

Graduation Plans

Test Groups

Graduation Plan Progress

Graduation Plan Progress in PowerScheduler

Graduation Progress in the PowerSchool SIS Teacher Portal

Graduation Progress in the PowerSchool SIS Student and Parent Portal

Graduation Progress Report

The Clock in/Clock Out feature now provides auto-calculation of the Clock in/Clock Out transaction for period attendance improving ease-of-use and efficiency, as well as promoting consistent attendance for accurate attendance accounting. Attendance Clerks can now:

• Set Clock in/Clock Out meeting threshold levels for the school and year (Start Page > School > Attendance Preferences). Thresholds are copied to the next school year when the next year's term is created.
• Period attendance records are suggested within the Clock in/Clock Out entry based upon the time missed (minutes or percentage) on period/meeting thresholds.
• View/edit clock in/out times easily within the day's attendance schedule.

Attendance Preferences

Meeting/Interval Attendance

Incident Action Attendance

Attendance Clerks can now use the default code or override code quickly in each period, regardless of whether they are using Clock in/Clock Out.

Meeting/Interval Attendance

Incident Action Attendance

Take Single Day Attendance

Take Seating Chart Attendance

Administrators can now define fitness tests and scales based on national or state recommendations to track student fitness. In this release, administrators are now able to:

• Define fitness tests and scales for use in the district
• Administer tests to students individually or in groups
• Enter fitness scores for individual students, or for groups of students using the mass-entry function
• Review individual student fitness results

The Health Plugin Data Migration feature (Start Page > District > Health Setup - Health Plugin Data Migration) provides the ability to migrate data currently stored in PowerPack Health tables to the new Enhanced Health tables. 

All updates to the Enhanced Health PowerSchool Data Sets are now complete and available within the Data Import Manager and the Data Export Manage:

• Health - Concerns
• Health - Contact Log
• Health - Medication
• Health - Medication Doses
• Health - Medication Inventory
• Health - Misc.
• Health - Monitoring - Diabetes
• Health - Office Visit
• Health - PE Waiver
• Health - Physicals
• Health - Student Health

• Associate medication (and inventory) to a student without creating a schedule.
• Track medication by the unit.
• Access a student's health record from the Daily Log.
• View which student a Daily Log record pertains to when open.
• Track vital signs on an office visit.
• Collapsed user interface for Office Visit for usability

Daily Log

Medication

Office Visits

Districts have the opportunity to retain Change History records for up to 10 years. Please note that Change History records will require additional storage. This setting is configured within the PowerSchool SIS installer.

Using the Purge Change History special operation, you can change history records greater than the Retain Change History setting. For example, if the Retain Change History setting is set to 1 year, only those records that are greater than one year will be purged.

Change History

Purge Change History

PowerTeacher Pro - Preview Grade Calculations

Teachers now have the opportunity to preview how unsaved assignments or standards scores will affect students' final grades and standards grades.

PowerTeacher Pro - Final Grades Report

Teachers can now generate a report containing final grades and comments to verify student results.

PowerTeacher Pro - Missing Assignment Report

Teachers can now generate a report that lists missing assignments, by student or by class.

PowerTeacher Pro - Standards Grades Report

Teachers can now generate a detailed report of standards grades, by assignment or by reporting term.

Teachers can now send plain-text emails to students and contacts directly from the Create option in PowerTeacher Pro. An option to Copy Emails will copy all selected email addresses (separated by a semicolon and space) to the clipboard, allowing an email that requires rich text or attachments to be quickly drafted using another email service.

PSF-31183

Viewing Attendance Change History records is now available only at the school level. The maximum date range for Attendance Change History is 7 days. All other categories are now limited to a maximum date range of 31 days.

PSF-26155

The System Setup > System Settings > Security page now contains an Enable PowerTeacher Administrator setting. By default, this setting is off and users cannot sign in to the PowerTeacher Administrator portal. It is recommended that PowerTeacher Administrator remain off if your district has fully moved to PowerTeacher Pro.

The User Settings page in the PowerSchool SIS Admin portal has been renamed to Manage Profile. In addition, the Personalize page in the PowerSchool Teacher portal has been replaced with the Manage Profiles page. User details are now included on the page, as well as all previous functionality.

PowerSchool Admin - Access Accounts

When viewing the Access Accounts page, Access Password is incorrectly masked for users who have view-only page permissions. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-35268

PowerSchool Admin - Automated Study Hall

In some instances, Automated Study Hall schedules students into different sections during overlapping timeframes. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-30015

PowerSchool Admin - Boundary

In some instances, when a school boundary or district of residence boundary has a large number of points, attempting to edit the boundary results in an error. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-31184

PowerSchool Admin - Calendar Setup

When using the Automated Calendar Setup, Bell Schedules with a value of 0 are excluded if Adjust Which Bell Schedules is set to Empty. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-32837

PowerSchool Admin - Course Setup

Including Has Fees when filtering courses may include courses with fees from a previous school year. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-32485

PowerSchool Admin - Data Export Manager

When an Oracle SQL reserved word is used as a Field Name, attempts to export data through the Data Export Manager fail. This issue is now resolved. Reserved words cannot be used as Field Names.

PSF-29241

PowerSchool Admin - Data Export Manager

When exporting a .csv file using Data Export Manager in Chrome 75+, the file saves as a .txt file. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-12541

PowerSchool Admin - Enrollment_SchoolID

When an inactive or transferred-out student is re-enrolled, the Enrollment_SchoolID is incorrectly updated with the School_Number. This issue is now resolved. The Enrollment_SchoolID field retains its original value.

PSF-33417

PowerSchool Admin - Field Level Security

In some cases when accessing the Field Level Security page, an error occurs when the number of records is exactly at the 1,000 markers. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-31656

PowerSchool Admin - Gradebook

In some cases when the Appropriate maximum number of characters is defined to be 1000 characters or fewer, the remaining characters counter is hidden. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-15727

PowerSchool Admin - Health Management

When using the Not Recorded Immunization Mode in the Health Management Student Immunization Count, students who are compliant but have not yet recorded receipt of the vaccine are excluded. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-19639

PowerSchool Admin- PowerScheduler

In some cases, the following PowerScheduler reports may not return results.

• Course Request Tally
• Unscheduled Rooms
• Unscheduled Students
• Unscheduled Teachers

This issue is now resolved.

PSF-29752

PowerSchool Admin - PowerScheduler

When a dash ("-") is included in the day abbreviation within PowerScheduler, the DAT tag *period_info does not return any data. This has been resolved. PowerScheduler no longer supports the dash character within the day abbreviation.

PSF-34721

PowerSchool Admin - PowerScheduler

Primary course requests that are not filled in do not display in the PowerScheduler Schedule Course Enrollment report when the student has multiple requests for the same course. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-29368

PowerSchool Admin - Reports

In some cases, Report Engine-based reports fail to render if a <, >, or & character is present in the text. This issue is now resolved. Improvements have been made to better handle these characters in these types of reports. However, there are some cases where these may still fail such as when another character immediately follows the ampersand (&) character.

PSF-6298

PowerSchool Admin - Reports

When attempting to run a report for an individual student, an error occurs if the student has a Health Concern Alert. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-34661

PowerSchool Admin - School Settings

The value set in the Default Term Level setting is not applied when the school is out of session or between school years. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-33212

PowerSchool Admin - Search

Attempting the Search for Additional Family Members takes a considerable amount of time to complete when the option to Include Student's Last Name in Search is selected. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-27651

PowerSchool Admin - Special Functions

In some instances, the Backfill functions do not complete and return an error if there are students who have switched Continuing Education schools during the term. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-23447

PowerTeacher Pro - Users Signed Out

Under certain circumstances, when admin users accessed PowerTeacher Pro through read-only access, the users were sporadically signed out. This issue is now resolved.

PSF-34577

As part of this release two options have been added when advanced email is enabled.

• Email Batch Size - Enabled administrators to define how many emails are sent every 30 seconds.
• Use Reply-To When Sending - When enabled this setting will add the Reply-To attribute for the originating sender.

The code set entry for the medication frequency is not automatically seeded in version 20.11.0.0 (code = PRN). 

Workaround: It can be added manually if desired, imported from the code set samples for Health on PowerSchool Community, or will be automatically added with 20.11.1.0.

When utilizing PowerSchool SIS in an array configuration, the PowerSchool SIS nodes may not start if the time between the servers is out of sync by more than 20 seconds.
When this issue occurs the following messages may appear in the log:

• Waiting for task master schema updates to complete
• District (server_address) remained unavailable

This will impact only multiple node environments during startup, and will not impact a server that is already running.
PowerSchool SIS should be run on a server with an Operating System that is synced with a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server to ensure consistent time across the nodes. The Windows Operating System attempts to sync the server time every 7 days.

If the PowerSchool SIS is enabled as an OIDC Service Provider for SSO for parents and/or students using Microsoft Azure or Google as the IdP, parents and/or students cannot sign into PowerSchool Mobile Android or iOS applications.

After upgrading to PowerSchool SIS 20.11.0.0, the Email Students and Parents feature in PowerTeacher Gradebook no longer functions correctly. This issue is slated to be resolved in 20.11.0.1.

In the PowerSchool SIS 2021 spring back-to-school release, the New Experience introduced in PowerSchool SIS version 20.4.0.0 will be the only look that is available for the PowerSchool SIS Admin and PowerSchool SIS Teacher portals. The "classic look" will no longer be available. All users not already using the New Experience will be automatically transitioned. We are providing notification in advance so that districts have ample time to test and make changes to any impacted customizations.