PowerSchool SIS 20.11.0.0
PowerSchool SIS version 20.11.0.0 is available as of 11/20/2020:
New Features
Feature | Description | Learn More |
---|---|---|
Grad Planner Support | 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:
| Graduation Plan Progress in PowerScheduler Graduation Progress in the PowerSchool SIS Teacher Portal Graduation Progress in the PowerSchool SIS Student and Parent Portal |
PowerSchool Admin - Clock In/Clock Out | 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:
| |
PowerSchool Admin - Attendance Default Code and Override Code | 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. | |
PowerSchool Subs - Group by Track Attendance | The PowerSchool SIS Substitute portal now includes the Group by Track feature for taking attendance. | |
Fitness Tracking | 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:
| Fitness Tests and Scales Fitness Scores |
PowerSchool Admin - PowerPack Migration | 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. | PowerPack Migration |
PowerSchool Admin - Enhanced Health Functionality PowerSchool Data Sets | All updates to the Enhanced Health PowerSchool Data Sets are now complete and available within the Data Import Manager and the Data Export Manage:
| Work with Health Data |
PowerSchool Admin - Enhanced Health Management | Improvements have been made to Enhanced Health Management providing nurses with the ability to:
| |
PowerSchool Admin - PowerSchool SIS as OIDC Service Provider | Admins can now set up PowerSchool SIS with SSO with Microsoft Azure and Google for Teachers, Admins, Parents, and Students. | PowerSchool SIS as OIDC Service Provider for SSO |
PowerSchool Admin - Change History | 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. | |
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. | Preview Final Grades or Preview Standards Grades |
PowerTeacher Pro - Final Grades Report | Teachers can now generate a report containing final grades and comments to verify student results. | Final Grades Report |
PowerTeacher Pro - Missing Assignment Report | Teachers can now generate a report that lists missing assignments, by student or by class. | Missing Assignment Report |
PowerTeacher Pro - Standards Grades Report | Teachers can now generate a detailed report of standards grades, by assignment or by reporting term. | Standards Grades Report |
PowerTeacher Pro - Publish Scores Update | Assignment Standards Scores now respect the Publish Scores option on an assignment. | Publish Scores Update |
PowerTeacher Pro - Update Auto-Calculated Assignment Standards | When new standards are added to a previously graded assignment that has its standards auto-calculated, those new standards will have their scores auto-calculated. | Auto-Calculate Assignment Standards |
PowerTeacher Pro - Email from PowerTeacher Pro | 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. | Email Students and Contacts |
Enhancements
Feature | Description | Reference |
---|---|---|
PowerSchool Admin - Boundary | When defining your district boundaries, you can now enter 14 decimal places for latitude and longitude. | PSF-31183 |
PowerSchool Admin - Change History Scalability | 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-36597 |
PowerSchool Admin - Courses | The Courses page now includes an option to search by Alternate Course Number. | PSF-26155 |
PowerTeacher Gradebook - Enable PowerTeacher Administrator | 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. | PSF-21587 |
PowerSchool Admin and Teacher - Manage Profiles | 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. | ISS-332 |
PowerSchool Public and Teacher Portals | Several improvements have been made to improve accessibility within the PowerSchool Public portal and the PowerSchool Teacher portal. | PSF-30124 |
PowerSchool - Infrastructure | As part of this release PowerSchool SIS has moved from Oracle Java to Amazon Corretto Java, which is based on OpenJDK, for server-side use. | PSF-16361 |
PowerSchool - Security | As part of this release the tables available when utilizing Quick Export, DDE, DDA, and/or Templates functions can be restricted based on the user's role configuration. This change brings legacy export functionality inline with Data Export Manager. | PSF-21560 |
PowerSchool - System Startup | Start up logging has been changed to reflect a separation of system startup from district startup. Two summaries of schema update status now appear in the log, the first for system and the second for district. | PSF-33059 |
Resolved Issues
Feature | Description | Reference |
---|---|---|
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 | When Include Inactive Students is enabled in PowerSchool Enrollment, State/Provincial Reporting fields may not be copied from the Students table to the ReEnrollments table when re-enrolling an Inactive or Transferred-Out student. This issue can occur when a student who has been transferred out of school is delivered via API by PowerSchool Enrollment. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-37468 |
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 - Logs | In some instances, PowerSchool SIS logs included personal information or insufficient information to determine the source of a problem. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-36248 |
PowerSchool Admin - Maintenance | When the PowerSchool SIS server is unable to connect to PowerSource, attempts to log in as a Maintenance user may fail. This issue is now resolved | PSF-33660 |
PowerSchool Admin- PowerScheduler | In some cases, the following PowerScheduler reports may not return results.
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 |
PowerSchool Mobile - Single Sign-On | In some cases, a single sign-on error occurs when signing in as a student or a parent. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-36984 |
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 |
PowerSchool Admin - Grade Scales | In some cases when editing a Grade Scale record from DDA or outside of the Grade Scale setup page, an error may occur. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-36024 |
PowerSchool Admin - Security | In some cases, verbose technical error messages are shown to the end-user. This issue is now resolved. In cases where an error occurs a more user-friendly message is shown and the full error is recorded to the PowerSchool logs. | PSF-35084 |
PowerSchool Admin - Attendance | In some cases, Nightly Attendance can take a significant amount of time to run when between years. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-32544 |
PowerSchool Admin - Email | As part of this release two options have been added when advanced email is enabled.
| PSF-18576 |
PowerSchool Admin - School Settings | In Batch School Setup at both the District and the School level, we have removed the option to choose the grades to which the attendance point change will not apply. | PSF-26737 |
PowerSchool Admin - Search | When navigating the Term Picker using the arrow keys, the last option in the picker is partially hidden. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-26673 |
PowerSchool Admin - Attendance Change History | When a Substitute Teacher takes attendance in the /subs portal, the Changed By field in Attendance change history displayed "PS Maintenance". This issue has been fixed and the Changed By field will now show "Substitute". | PSF-35973 |
PowerSchool Admin - Contacts | When attempting to modify the phone number field on the Emergency Contact page of any Student record, if the associated contact record has the newly changed phone number value, the change will fail but appear to complete. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-33169 |
PowerSchool - Integration | As part of this release the Pearson Inform integration has been removed. Pearson officially announced the end-of-life for Inform in June 2017. | PSF-32163 |
PowerSchool Admin - Security | When working with staff security in Admin Access and Roles, access for a staff member can only be added to those schools which the District Administrator can access. | PSF-21552 |
PowerSchool Admin - Enrollment | In some cases field values may fail to copy from Students to the ReEnrollments table depending on the current users Field Level Security permissions. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-21406 |
PowerSchool Admin - Reports | After upgrading to PowerSchool SIS 20.4.0.0 or above the Consecutive Absences page does not recalculate as part of the nightly process or when manually executed. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-35086 |
Known Issues
Feature | Description | Reference |
---|---|---|
PowerSchool Admin - Co-Teaching Roles | In the Co-Teaching Roles table, the fields Code, Alt. code 1 and Alt. code 2display "{code} {code}" when the field is null or empty. | PSF-37168 |
PowerSchool Admin - Medication Frequency | 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. | PSF-37072 |
PowerSchool Admin - System Reports | PowerSchool has identified an issue where the names of the new reports sometimes display incorrectly. We are looking into this issue, and a fix will be included in an upcoming release. | -- |
PowerSchool Configuration | 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.
This will impact only multiple node environments during startup, and will not impact a server that is already running. | PSF-37690 |
PowerSchool Mobile Android/iOS Applications - PowerSchool SIS as OIDC Service Provider | 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. | -- |
PowerTeacher Gradebook | 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. | PSF-38540 |
Removed Features/Future Deprecation
Feature | Description | Reference |
---|---|---|
Legacy Look | 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. | New Experience |
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 configured incorrectly. The following table identifies the version number for each PowerSchool SIS component in this release compared to the previous release:
Component | Version Number | |
---|---|---|
20.4.5.1 | 20.11.0.0 | |
PowerSchool SIS Server | 20.4.5.1 | 20.11.0.0 |
PowerTeacher Gradebook | 2.8.0.18 | 2.8.0.21 |
ReportWorks | 1.5.1.29 | 1.5.1.32 |
PowerScheduler | 3.0.2 | 3.0.2 |
Oracle | 12.2.0.1 | 12.2.0.1 |
State Reporting | 20.9.2.1 | 20.11.1.2 |
Report SDK | 1.21.0.0 | 1.21.0.0 |
Oracle Java | 1.8u202 | |
Amazon Corretto Java | 1.8u262 |