PowerSchool SIS 21.11.0.0
PowerSchool SIS version 21.11.0.0 is available as of November 24, 2021. When the installers are available for download, an announcement will be posted on PowerSchool SIS Release Notification on PowerSchool Community.
New Features and Enhancements
| Feature or Product Area | Description | Learn More |
|---|---|---|
| PowerSchool Branding | Starting with this release, PowerSchool SIS will begin to leverage external resources, such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) services. PowerSchool SIS 21.11.0.0 will initially use a CDN to access certain user interface (UI) elements, such as the header bar styling, icons, and colors used at the top of the page. Future PowerSchool SIS versions may access other cloud-based services. What this means for customers:
Customers on PowerSchool SIS 21.11.0.0 can expect to find a new gradient background on the top header bar in the PowerSchool Admin and Teacher portals automatically between mid-December and early January, with a target date of December 10th. | |
| Academic and Career Planer | Multiple improvements to the Academic and Career Planner:
| Academic and Career Plan |
| Accessibility | Several enhancements have been made to improve accessibility within the PowerSchool Admin portal, including additional support for the following:
| |
| Full-Time Equivalency | When a school has years and terms that span the full school year (ex.: 7/1/2020 - 6/30/2021) and a student is transferred out on the first day of school, the Full-Time Equivalency would default to the previous year's values. If the student's entry date equals their exit date, this field would no longer display the previous school year values. | Full-Time Equivalencies |
| Health | Additional functionality is now available for easy search of student medication. Administrators can:
| Health Management Work with Students |
| PowerSchool SIS/Naviance Integration | Naviance users can now access a plugin to enable Naviance student sync, named Naviance. This plugin is not live until an admin enables it. Additionally, an admin can configure the SIS as an IdP for Naviance SSO and AppSwitcher to work with Naviance. | |
| PowerSchool Admin - Success Pages | When an action is completed on a page, a success banner will replace independent success pages. This currently only applies to pages within framesets. | |
| PowerSchool Portals - Security | Username and Password fields have been updated to disable autocomplete, spellcheck, autocorrect, and auto-capitalize, where not already present, as part of the OWASP recommendation. | |
| PowerSchool System - Java | The server-side version of Java has been updated from 8u262 to 8u302. | |
| PowerSchool System - Oracle | Oracle 19c is now the minimum requirement for PowerSchool SIS 21.11.0.0 or higher. | Hardware and Software Requirements for PowerSchool 21.x |
| PowerSchool System - Tomcat | The Apache Tomcat version has been updated from 7.0.103 to 8.5. | |
| Universal Rostering | The OneRoster /classes endpoint now includes grades. | Universal Rostering |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Course-Level Traditional Grade Calculation Formulas | Administrators can assign a traditional grade calculation formula to a course, allowing for consistent calculations across sections of the same course across a district. | Course-Level Traditional Grade Calculation Formulas |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Standards Scoresheet | Teachers are now able to filter assignments on the Standards Scoresheet, allowing teachers to hone the page to specific categories or due dates for analysis. | Standards Scoresheet |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Missing Assignment Report | Teachers can now include assignments with a score of zero on the missing assignment report. | Missing Assignment Report |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Settings | Teachers can now set a PowerTeacher Pro starting page other than the Assignment List. In PowerTeacher Pro choose Settings, then Display Settings. Scroll to the bottom of the page and choose a Custom Starting Page, regardless of browser or device. | Custom Starting Page |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Transfer Scores | Teachers can now review the score type and assignment points for each assignment available on Transfer Score, allowing teachers to understand the weight of each assignment. | Transfer Scores |
Resolved Issues
| Product Area | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| PowerScheduler Admin - Constraints | When Student Preference Constraints were used and Allow Student Repeats in Different Terms was selected for some classes, the preference constraints were not being followed. | PSF-29852 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Attendance | Updating attendance comments outside of the original school is not supported. When attempting to update attendance comments at the District Office the expected error did not occur, causing users to believe they may have successfully edited the attendance comments. | PSF-54352 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Attendance | In some cases, the changes made in 21.4.4.0 still did not allow the process to finish in a timely manner. Additional performance improvements have been made. | PSF-54256 |
| PowerSchool Admin - District Setup | When the Scale Used in GPA and Course Credit was deselected in Academic Grade Scale: Special Codes Scale, the Grad Credits options were still selected but not visible in the table. | PSF-53346 |
| PowerSchool Admin - District Setup | The Entry Codes and Exit Codes allowed the creation of blank records which allowed duplicate values. Validation is now in place to ensure that there are no blank codes. | PSF-15593 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Export | When exporting a template configured for CSV, field values with a comma (",") had the comma replaced with a double space (" ") even if the Surround Fields option was enabled. | PSF-50926 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Graduation Plan | When a requirement group has multiple items needed to earn it, the requirement group displayed the order of the requirements differently in the graduation requirement set up and in the student's graduation plan progress. The evaluation order appeared to be the reverse of what was configured. | PSF-54891 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Graduation Plan | When a requirement group does not have any direct requirements such as a test requirement, the misleading message Requirement Satisfied was displayed. It now will not display any message in that scenario. | PSF-54885 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Health | The Provider field in Add Office Visit has increased from 30 to 135 characters to help avoid errors when concatenating the user's First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name information into this field. | PSF-15528 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Health | When students had existing Health Screening records with missing grade levels, the screenings dropdown no longer functioned. Customers will now be able to add Health Screenings with this scenario. | PSSR-276322 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Object Reports | When selecting a localized language other than English as the runtime option in an Object Report, the Localization was not being applied when using the *contact_info DAT. | PSF-54147 |
| PowerSchool Admin - PowerSource SSO | The following plugins have been removed as part of this release:
As PowerSchool continues to move to the PowerSchool Community for Knowledge Base articles and forums the linking to PowerSource can cause confusion to users that get redirected to multiple sites. Due to this, the plugin is being removed. | PSF-15583 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Preferences | When going to Attendance Preference using a Firefox browser, an error briefly appeared. Some users also experienced slowness when loading the Attendance Preference and Attendance under Functions. | PSF-52211 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Schedule Commit | When a commit was already running, it was possible to commit a schedule for a school a second time. A new error message will indicate a commit for the school is currently occurring. | PSF-51629 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Security | When parents or students encountered an error, it contained technical details causing further confusion. Technical details have been removed from the error messaging. | PSF-51732 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Stability | In some cases, the Enrollment Summary report could cause stability issues. | PSF-55435 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Stability | When running in an array, semaphores such as attendance and scheduling may not be correctly cleared. | PSF-55181 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Start Page | When performing searches starting with S and U, the autocomplete may appear to become unresponsive. This issue is dependent on the number of State and User custom fields. Performance has been improved by limiting the number of fields returned in the autocomplete results. | PSF-55727 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Start Page | When using the Advanced Search function on the Start Page, students were not added, subtracted, or set from the current selection as expected. | PSF-53750 |
| PowerSchool Admin - System | A change was made to prevent the use of drive letters in the path field when adding or editing an AutoComm, Autosend, or Data Export Manager record. Using a drive letter in the path will result in an error. | PSF-54445 |
| PowerSchool Admin - System | PowerSchool SIS (OLTP) may use more CPU than expected impacting performance in some cases. | PSF-57025 |
| PowerSchool Admin - System Administrator | When disabling the OIDS plugin, the Admin URL would redirect to the Identity Provider Login page instead of the traditional login page. | PSF-50702 |
| PowerSchool Admin - System Reports | When a user attempted to delete Scheduled ReportWorks or State Reporting Reports they would receive an error, but the report continued to run at the scheduled time. | PSF-54566 |
| PowerSchool Administrator - Traditional Grade Calculation | When an administrator attempted to delete a section that includes section-specific standards weighting created by a teacher for the traditional grade calculation, the delete would fail. | PSF-53844 |
| PowerSchool Teacher - Seating Chart | When a Lead Teacher made a custom Seating Chart and combined it with other Sections, the Co-Teacher who did not have access to one or more of the other Sections would get an HTTP 500 error in PowerTeacher when trying to access the Seating Chart. | PSF-55119 |
| PowerTeacher - Gradebook | When a teacher installed PowerTeacher Gradebook the installer was missing a file, preventing the application to launch.
| PSF-54608 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Recalculate Final Grades | When a user cleared Calculate Overall Class Grades on a Traditional Grade Calculation Formula, it would not clear out the calculated grades. | PSF-16062 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Standards Grade Calculations | When an administrator reviewed a teacher's PowerTeacher Pro gradebook, the Standards Grade Calculations page would not display the teacher's chosen calculation selections. | PSF-20598 |
Known Issues
| Product Area | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| PowerSchool - Admin | The following link names under Page and Data Management have changed:
| PSF-57673 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Collapsible Page Elements | Collapsible page elements in PowerTeacher Pro and PowerTeacher Pro setup pages may not expand when a user clicks on the arrow or area surrounding the title. The user should click directly on the title text to expand these elements. | PSF-56923 |
Removed Features/Future Deprecation
| Feature | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| PowerTeacher Gradebook | PowerTeacher Gradebook will be removed from PowerSchool SIS with the Back-to-School release (Spring 2022). 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 | |
|---|---|---|
21.4.5.0 | 21.11.0.0 | |
PowerSchool SIS Server | 21.4.5.0 | 21.11.0.0 |
PowerTeacher Gradebook | 2.8.0.25 | 2.8.0.26 |
ReportWorks | 1.5.1.37 | 1.5.1.38 |
PowerScheduler | 3.0.2 | 3.0.2 |
Oracle | 12.2.0.1 or 19c | 19c |
State Reporting | 21.9.2.0 | 21.11.2.1 |
Report SDK | 1.26.0.0 | 1.27.0.0 |
| Amazon Corretto Java | 1.8u262 | 1.8u302 |