PowerSchool SIS 20.4.0.0

PowerSchool New Experience

Administrators and teachers now have an enhanced look and feel that provides powerful searching capabilities, quick data charts, and more direct access to content! The PowerSchool New Experience Includes:

• Updated look and feel
• Improved search experience, including smart search
• Improved gender and grade searching
• Access to quick data
• Surfacing of frequently-used content, reducing clicks
• Access to the daily bulletin

Not ready for the new experience? The new experience can be disabled for the entire district (District > Miscellaneous) for the admin and teacher portals. Individuals can also disable the new look or personalize their experience by clicking on their initials on the top right corner, then select Settings. The Daily Bulletin visibility can be configured per school/district basis (District > Special Functions > Daily Bulletin Setup > Visibility)

Note: Please be mindful, any customizations might be affected by the New Experience and may need to be adjusted.

Miscellaneous District Settings

New Experience

New Experience in PowerSchool Teacher

PowerSchool Admin - Batch School Setup

Batch School Setup provides the ability for district administrators to set up specific school settings for a single school and copy the settings to other schools and to groups of like schools so that each school does not need to be set up separately each year. Settings include School Years and Terms, Calendar, Reporting Terms, and Quick Lookup settings. District administrators can view a summary of each school’s settings to validate their various settings are as expected. This feature is available from the District Setup page (District > Batch School Setup).

Change History provides the ability for administrators to track changes made to data that has been added/changed/deleted in PowerSchool SIS. Changes are tracked from all sources, so any change made to stored data will be recorded regardless of the mechanism (whether by a user through the UI, import, API, etc). Change History will also record the username, date/time, and IP address of the user who made the change. Change History can be enabled by category from the System Settings page (System > System Settings > Change History) and enabled by role from the Roles Administration page (System > Security > Roles Administration).

Users can view changes from the record-level by using the Change History link on enabled pages or from the administrator Change History page (System > Data Management > Change History). Categories for change history include: Attendance, Career Tech Setup, Class Enrollments, Contacts, Health (various), Incidents, Lunch, School Enrollments, Staff Permissions, Stored Grades, Student Contacts, and Transportation.

Information on Data Retention Policies and recommendations for this feature can be found here.

PowerSchool Admin - Incident Action Attendance

Incident Action Attendance provides administrators with the ability to quickly enter attendance for the students involved in an incident using the Quick Incident or the Detailed Incident pages. Attendance can be entered for the entirety of the action date range (set all for range) or individually by day/meeting. Districts can easily restrict the available attendance codes to a predefined list if they choose, allowing administrators to control access to different attendance codes based on the action used in the incident. Additionally, this feature automatically uses the school's default attendance mode (Daily, Meeting, or Interval). This feature can be enabled on a per school/per year basis in the attendance preferences (School > Attendance > Preferences). Once enabled, action codes must then be assigned action/attendance code mappings (School > Attendance > Attendance/Action Code Mapping). Settings are carried forward from year-to-year when the next year's term is created.

Note: The incident functionality in PowerPack Log Entries Attendance sync. That functionality should be disabled when using Incident Action Attendance.

Incident Action Attendance

Attendance Preferences

Create Quick Incidents

Create Detailed Incidents

PowerSchool Admin - Admit Slip

School-level administrators and attendance clerks can now print an Admit Slip for students leaving or returning to school. The Admit Slip serves as a "hall pass" that lists the classes the student has missed and includes a parent and teacher signature lines. An Admit Slip can only be printed for the current date. The Admit Slip works with both meeting and daily attendance and utilizes clock in/clock out data if enabled. This feature is available using the Attendance Data Grid page (Start Page > Attendance) or from the student's Attendance page (Student > Attendance).

View and Add Daily Attendance

View and Add Meeting Attendance

Meeting/Interval Attendance

Daily Attendance

PowerSchool Teacher - Teacher Incident Referral

Teachers can now create basic incidents from within the PowerSchool SIS Teacher portal (Student Information > Select Screens > Submit Incident Entry). Incidents created by teachers appear in Incident Management in the PowerSchool admin portal with the Incident Type of Teacher Referral, which can be changed by administrators once they review it. This feature can be enabled via District > Miscellaneous. Access to the Teacher Referral incident type should be granted to the appropriate security groups. Additionally, email notifications may be set up via District > School/School Info > Edit School.

Miscellaneous District Settings

Teacher Incident Referrals

Incident Entry in PowerSchool Teacher

PowerSchool Teacher - Career Tech

Teachers can now manage Career Tech Programs and Certifications for students in their Career Tech sections. Teachers can easily view and maintain the current declared programs for their students, currently earned and attempted certifications as well as view any career tech courses taken as a part of their final grades/transcript (Student Information > Select Screens > Career Tech). The option only displays for courses that are marked as 'Career Tech'.

Career Tech District Setup

Career Tech School Setup

Career Tech in PowerSchool Teacher

PowerSchool Admin - System Report Security

Using the Edit System Report Security page (System > System Report Security), you can now quickly and easily limit access to System Reports (on the System Reports tab) to specific security groups ensuring staff only have access to the reports (and report data) that they should have access to.

System Report Security

PowerSchool Admin - Incident Profile Report

Using the new Incident Profile Report (System Reports > Incident Profile), you can now quickly and easily view a detailed summary of student incidents created using Incident Management.

PowerSchool Admin - Staff List Report

Using the new Staff List report (System Reports > Staff List), you can now quickly and easily view a printout of staff members based on selected criteria.

Staff List

PowerSchool Admin - Enhanced Health

Functionality currently supported in PowerPack Health is now available in PowerSchool SIS as Enhanced Health. Enhanced Health includes the tracking of Medications (inventory and dosing), Health Concerns, Physicals, PE Waivers, Contact Log, and more! This new functionality allows tracking of more detailed medical and health information within PowerSchool SIS. Enhanced Health can be enabled on Health Setup page (District > Health Setup > Setup).

Note: PowerPack Health is not compatible with Enhanced Health.

PowerSchool Admin - Screenings Updates

You can now perform and track Lead screenings within PowerSchool and define the following: Screening Provider Type, Screening Outcome, and Lead Waiver Reason. Additional Tuberculosis Screening fields are available for Blood Test Result and Blood Test Type. Additional Vision Screening fields are available for Left Eye Test Result - With Correction, Right Eye Test Result - With Correction, Both Eyes Test Result, Both Eyes Test Result - with Correction, and Muscle Balance.

Screenings Setup

Screenings

PowerSchool Admin - Diabetic Monitoring

You can now track student monitoring events. Events can be scheduled or "on demand," and appear on the Daily Log. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > Monitoring).

PowerSchool Admin - Health Plan Templates, Health Plans, and Health Plan Read Receipts

Individual student health plans (Student > Health > Health Plans) can now be tracked in PowerSchool SIS, indicating for a specific health condition (typically) how to treat, recognize and react to a medical emergency with a student. Health Plan Templates (District > Health Plan Templates) are also available but not required to be used. Health Plan Templates can be used to "start" a health plan for a student, and then the plan can be customized for the specific student and their condition. An active Health Plan appears in the student's Medical Alert pop-up in the admin portal, as well as the teacher portal. The Health Concern alert includes a View Plan feature, which can be used to track who has "read and acknowledged" the health plan.

Health Plan Templates

Health Plans

Health Plan Read Receipts

Read Receipts in PowerSchool Teacher

View Alerts in PowerSchool Teacher

PowerSchool Admin - Health Alert Updates

As a district enables Enhanced Health, the student Medical Alert is updated to use Health Concerns information (Student > Health > Health Concerns). Currently, the student Medical Alert uses information entered in the Medical Alert Text field on the student Emergency/Medical page (Student > Emergency/Medical). During the transition time for the district, information will continue to be read from the legacy field until at least one health concern is added using Health Concerns.

PowerSchool Admin - Health Concerns

As part of Enhanced Health, you can now track health concern information associated to a student, utilizing code sets instead of text fields, for better tracking and reporting capabilities. An active Health Concern appears in the student's Medical Alert pop-up in the admin portal, as well as the teacher portal. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > Health Concerns).

PowerSchool Admin - Medications

As part of Enhanced Health, you can now track medication information associated to a student, including changes to inventory and doses/dispensing of medication to the student. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > Medications).

PowerSchool Admin - Physicals

As part of Enhanced Health, you can now track physical examination information associated to a student, including when the physical occurred, several vital signs, when a concussion form was signed, referrals and additional comments. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > Physical).

PowerSchool Admin - PE Waivers

As part of Enhanced Health, you can now track physical education waiver information associated to a student, including the date and who authorized the waiver. In addition, these waivers will show for the classroom teacher. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > PE Waiver). Student PE Waivers also appear in the PowerSchool SIS Teacher portal (PE Waiver icon).

PE Waivers

PE Waivers in PowerSchool Teacher

PowerSchool Admin - Contact Log

As part of Enhanced Health, you can now track instances of communication concerning a student's medical health, you can use the Contact Log tab on the student Health page to collect, track, and manage this type of student health information, including the date and time the contact is to occur, the staff member and/or group who initiated the contact, the reason the contact is taking place, the individual who referred the contact, and whether intervention or follow-up is needed. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > Contact Log).

PowerSchool Admin - Other

As part of Enhanced Health, you can now track health insurance and other information associated to a student. This feature is available on the student's Health page (Student > Health > Other).

PowerSchool Admin - Office Visits Updates

The functionality to record accidents in PowerPack Health has been combined with Office Visits in Enhanced Health, along with accident-specific fields (location, injury body part). Setup for Office Visits now appears under Health Code Sets (District > Health Setup > Code Sets).

Health Code Sets

Office Visits

PowerSchool Admin - Daily Log

You can now access the Daily Log, which serves as a "home page" from which a nurse can view all scheduled (dated) health events. While the daily log defaults to today, for a quick and easy snapshot of the needs of the current day, filtering capabilities allows nurses to see a day, week, or custom range of medical/health events. The Daily Log includes medication dispensing, screenings, office visits, communication/contact logs and more. This feature is available on the Health Management page (Start > Health Management > Daily Log).

Administrators can now grant teachers access at the course/school/section level to adjust the cutoff and other values related to the grade scale assigned to it. Teachers can then adjust the cutoff, value and color level of the grade scale, or choose to ignore a grade (A, A-, etc.) within the grade scale assigned to the class.

Teachers now have a more user-friendly user interface when creating assignments, specifically when assigning standards to be graded. 

Administrators can now choose to give teachers access to the new contacts information related to a student, including the notes for a student/contact relationship.

Given that the receiving term is not locked, teachers can now transfer scores from any term in the school year. 

As part of this release any Core or State Reporting Field Sets that have not already been migrated will be migrated on startup. This auto migration does not include the User Created Custom Fields field set.

It is encouraged that any Fields Sets listed, with the exception of User Created Custom Fields, be migrated before upgrading. This can be done under Start Page > System Administrator > Page and Data Management > Custom Field Data Migration. By doing these migrations before the installation of 20.4.0.0 the data can be validated by using the readiness check as part of the migration process.

As part of this release release the following 3rd party libraries have been updated:

• Tomcat has been upgraded from 7.0.93 to 7.0.103
• Java has been updated from Oracle 8u161 to Oracle 8u202 (BCL license). PowerSchool, PowerTeacher Gradebook Standalone, and the Schedule Engine Java versions have all been updated.
  • As part of the Java update to 8u202 the Java timezone information has also been updated to include 2019a timezone data.
  • Note: A future release will update to an OpenJDK variant due to licensing changes for Oracle Java after version 8u202.
• Jsoup - Cross-site Scripting (XSS) protection

PSF-16350

PSF-16318

PSF-16344

In some instances, the PSRW_STANDARDHIERARCHY view does not correctly sort standards, which results in incorrectly sorted reports. 

In some instances PSSIS_ based views may not work in tlist_sql, ODBC, or other areas when the Oracle sessions date format is not in the DD-MON-YYYY or DD-MON-RR format.

These issues have been resolved. 

When running ONSIS Elementary Submission, the report takes a long time to complete. This issue is now resolved. Performance has been improved on the report.

Note: Only applicable for Ontario.

As part of this release a number of small issues have been resolved:

• Sorting has been made more consistent when sending last 24 hours of attendance (AttendanceQueue) using AutoSend in a multiple node environment.
• In some cases an error can occur when importing CodeSets when an import does not include all columns.
• When running the Auto-Fix Duplicate CC Enrollments Special Operation a benign "Invalid Code" appears.

In some cases a plugin may include web pages with unknown mime types. When enabling plugins with these file types these files may not be enabled. This issue is now resolved, when installing plugins the list of valid extensions is consistent in the various areas of the application. User defined mime types may also be used in cases where the mime type is not in the list of system defined types.

After deleting a plugin, any record that was modified by that plugin will display 'PS Maintenance' in the Changed By field in change history.

Workaround: None

PSF-26757

PSF-26832

In Change History, if the user selects the category and changes the search end date to be the same as the start date without changing the start date, the search does not occur.

Workaround: Change the start date to a different date and search, then change it back. (e.g., 4/6/20 does not load, so the user changes the date to 4/13/20, searches, and changes the date back to 4/6/20).

The download of Change History for Career Tech has wrapping issues on the Credential and Cluster/Program columns. Additionally, some international characters are not displaying properly. Characters appear as ########.

Workaround: None

ClassCastExceptions occurring within ps-log-sdkhttpinvoke.log.

Workaround: Contact support.

After creating a new section, the user may be unable to sign out of the PowerSchool admin portal due to console errors.

Workaround: Once the user has created a section and is unable to logout, the user can navigate to the home page and logout. Also, the user can navigate to the sections page in the breadcrumbs and logout. It appears as long as they navigate away from the Sections created page, they can logout.

Attempting to perform a search of Contacts using a phone number may result in no records found if hyphens ('-') are included in the phone number.

Workaround: Remove the hyphens when entering the phone number to search.

When attempting to create a Health Plan for a student in Grade 0 using a template with smart tags, errors may occur which will prevent further interaction with the page. 

Workaround: Refresh the page and create the health plan without using a template.

When attempting to mass import contacts using the Data Import Manager, errors may occur when rows in the import file add or update an email with an email type that is assigned to an existing email address for that contact.

Workaround: For each contact within the import file, change the email type to one that is not already in use by that contact. If all email types are in use for that contact, there is no workaround available using the Data Import Manager; an administrator would then have to manually add or edit the email address using the Contacts pages.

In the quick incident wizard, after entering attendance for an action code with properly mapped attendance codes, if the user changes the action code to one that does not have any attendance codes mapped and submits the incident, the attendance for the first code is saved. 

Workaround: Do not change the action code after entering attendance.

When editing a Subcode in Incident Management, the checkbox This Action Affects Attendance is shown. This field is deprecated and has no functional impact, whether it is checked or unchecked. Instead, the Action/Attendance code mappings now determine whether an action affects attendance.

Workaround: No workaround - the checkbox appears but does not function.

When the New Experience is enabled, hovering over the User Menu in the header does not display the name of the person signed in, or their last session information.

Workaround: None

Values for Name, Time, Medication, Dosage, Route, Frequency, and Primary Reason for Giving appear truncated.

Workaround: None

When editing or deleting more than one screening record for a student, a psj-runtime error occurs upon submitting.

Workaround: After editing or deleting a single screening record for a student, click Submit. Then proceed to the next screening record you want to edit or delete for the student.

Administrators are able to see Class Grade Scales when selecting grade scales on the Final Grade Exclusions page.

Workaround: Do not select a Class Grade Scale.

Teachers are able to save a grade scale that does not have a 0 cutoff. When this happens, PowerTeacher Pro will through intermittent errors while attempting to save grades, causing teachers to be unable to save grades.

Workaround: Do not save a grade scale that ignores the grade with a 0 cutoff.

PSF-14012

PSF-26304

PSF-23273

19.11.2.0

20.4.0.0

PowerSchool SIS Server

19.11.2.0

20.4.0.0

PowerTeacher Gradebook

2.8.0.14

2.8.0.17

ReportWorks

1.5.1.25

1.5.1.28

PowerScheduler

3.0.2

3.0.2

Oracle

12.2.0.1

12.2.0.1

State Reporting

20.1.2.1

20.4.4.0

Report SDK

1.21.0.0

1.21.0.0

Java

1.8u161

1.8u202