PowerSchool SIS 21.4.0.0
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:
Teachers can:
| Asset 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:
| |
Enhanced Health | Additional functionality is now available for importing and exporting health-related information. Administrators can:
| |
Fitness Tracking for Teachers | This feature allows teachers of designated courses to complete fitness tests for their students. Administrators can:
Teachers can:
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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:
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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:
|
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:
| |
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. | |
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. |
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 |