PowerSchool SIS 21.4.1.0
PowerSchool SIS version 21.4.1.0 is available as of May 27, 2021. When the installers are available for download, an announcement will be posted on the PowerSchool SIS Release Notification page on PowerSchool Community.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| PowerSchool SIS Attendance in Schoology | The PowerSchool SIS Attendance app, available in the Schoology app center, allows teachers to take attendance directly in Schoology. Teachers and co-teachers can:
Administrators are able to apply customizations, such as custom alerts, to the attendance page. Technical Contacts can find developer resources for customizing Schoology Attendance on the PowerSchool Developer site. The PowerSchool SIS Attendance app is available in the Schoology App Center and requires PowerSchool SIS 21.4.1+. Refer to the Schoology Help Center article on Using PowerSchool SIS Attendance with Schoology for more information about the application setup and use. Please see the latest PowerSchool Insider for more information on this feature! On-premise customers: When using the PowerSchool SIS Schoology Attendance app, additional network changes may be required. If your network devices (including load balancers) are utilizing Cookies for session persistence, the SameSite flag will need to be adjusted. The SameSite=None value will ensure that requests coming from Schoology will be routed to the correct application node. Specific configuration steps would depend upon the type of device used (For example, F5, NGINX, etc). Contact your vendor on how to enable “SameSite=None” on the session persistence cookie(s). Additional details can be found in the PowerSchool Load Balancer Guide. | Using PowerSchool SIS Attendance with Schoology |
Enhancements
| Product Area | Description | Learn More |
|---|---|---|
| PowerSchool Admin - Asset Tracking | Administrators can now view a list of relevant assets for a given student by choosing a student and selecting Asset Tracking from the student menu. This new page allows admins to check in or out Asset inventory, and view inventory assigned to a student or associated with their class schedule. Access to the page is controlled through the Accessible Student Screens list within Groups security settings. | Track Assets for Students |
| PowerSchool Admin - Enhanced Health | Additional functionality is now available for the Enhanced Health Module:
| |
| PowerSchool Admin - Graduation Plan | When creating a graduation plan test requirement, users can now choose whether test scores should be from the same day or if they should be combined from any testing instance. | Graduation Plan District Setup |
| PowerSchool Admin - Historic Graduation Plan | The Historic Graduation Plans page now has a warning and improved error messaging for rare failures when promoting graduation plans to the new format. While infrequent, these errors now clearly indicate which system processes failed. | 2021-10-20_16-53-25_Historic Graduation Plans |
| PowerSchool Admin - Installer | PowerSchool SIS and ReportWorks Service Maximum Memory values have been increased to align with the Installation Guide recommendations starting with PowerSchool 12.x. The base values are 6144mb for PowerSchool SIS and 2048mb for ReportWorks. | |
| PowerSchool Admin - Search Command | The enrolled_in and not_enrolled_in searches have been changed to provide more consistent results when searching Course_Number. These searches will include pre-registered and active section enrollments regardless of date. Two new searches, currently_enrolled_in and not_currently_enrolled_in, have been added to offset the changes to the existing searches. These searches will only search active section enrollments as of today. | Student Basic Search |
| PowerSchool Admin- System | System stability improvements have been made around PowerQueries and the TLIST_SQL tag. Timeouts have been added to help prevent long-running queries from impacting system stability. A timeout of 1 hour has been added to PowerQueries, while a timeout of 10 minutes has been added to the TLIST_SQL tag. | |
| PowerSchool Admin - Universal Rostering | The Universal Rostering connector has been updated to report additional username and other identifiers for staff and students. It also has updated users.email for students to report the student email address. | Universal Rostering |
Resolved Issues
| Product Area | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| PowerSchool Admin - Attendance | In some data scenarios, Attendance Nightly may take longer than expected after upgrading to PowerSchool 20.11.0.1. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-46939 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Attendance | When choosing an attendance code for a student in the Seating Chart view that is different than the value in the Attendance Code field, the attendance code did not save. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-43162 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Browser Information | Users were seeing incorrect browser information in the browser information column. The issue is now resolved. | PSF-42384 |
PowerSchool Admin - Changing School Number | When attempting to change the Schools School_Number, an error occurred that indicated Changing School Number is not recommended. This message was not correct and has been changed to indicate that this is not supported. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-32946 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Fees | The recalculation of an overpayment in the Fee Transactions page resulted in an increased balance instead of a credit balance. This caused the amount owed to a student to appear higher than it should be. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-15707 |
PowerSchool Admin - Photos | When special characters exist in a person’s name, the name did not appear properly in the photo pop-up. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-44048 |
PowerSchool Admin - Reports | The Scan by Teacher drop-down field in the Grade Count by Teacher Report included all staff with a status of Staff, where only staff members with the Teacher status should appear. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-43159 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Reports | When running the Class Attendance Audit report, with Month selected from the Break to a new page for each report parameter, the PDF report generated the months out of order. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-15713 |
| PowerSchool Admin - ReportWorks/SRP | In certain situations, ReportWorks reports or state reports may get stuck in running status. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-48120 |
| PowerSchool - Security | The Data Restriction Framework (DRF) evaluates security around certain URL parameters. The following issues have been found and resolved:
| PSF-48476 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Scheduled Exports | In some cases, Data Export Manager Scheduled Exports may not execute after upgrading to 20.11.0.0. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-42077 |
PowerSchool Admin - School Enrollment | When reactivating inactive students via the PS Enrollment API, the previous enrollment year's school name displayed the new enrolled school. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-47143 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Student Username | When attempting to save a student’s username with a space, an error is presented which contains spelling mistakes. This issue is resolved. | PSF-15511 |
| PowerSchool Admin - System | PowerSchool may fail to start after upgrading to PowerSchool 21.4.0.0 when one or more mapped drives are defined for the PowerSchool component and none of the drives are marked as a data folder. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-47640 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Test Connection | When receiving an error while performing Test Connection on Edit Remote Connections, that error contained spelling mistakes. This is now resolved. | PSF-41754 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Transfer Student | The Transfer Student Record function failed when the teacher comment included emojis in the previous LEA. This issue is now resolved.
| PSF-40591 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Translations | The Grades and Attendance and Standard Grades text were not easily translatable. The text did not show in most Localize PowerSchool searches because the text contains " " instead of a space, making it difficult to translate. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-15692 |
| PowerSchool Admin - Universal Rostering | If the teacher order on the section was set to 1, the teachers in the class were marked with the primary flag set to true. Now, only lead teachers are set as primary teachers. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-46553 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Admin Users Cannot Use Asset Tracking | Read-only admin users were unable to use Asset Tracking in PowerTeacher Pro. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-46999 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Checking-out/in Inventory | Under certain circumstances, when a teacher attempted to check in or check out a material assigned to another school, the teacher may be logged out of PowerTeacher Pro. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-46410 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Score Inspector Font Size Increase | To better facilitate accessibility, the font size for the comment bank and other parts of the score inspector has been increased when in specific view modes. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-41773 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Seating Chart | If an existing layout name only contains numeric values, the student list may not be populated when creating a new seating chart layout using Start from a pre-existing layout. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-47764 |
| PowerTeacher Pro - Standards Grade Report | Under certain circumstances, when teachers ran the Standards Grade Report, it would include standards that were not available for teachers to score. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-43683 |
| PowerSchool Student and Parent Portal | On certain mobile device browsers, the left navigation in the PowerSchool Parent and Student portal menu overlapped information. This issue is now resolved. | PSF-41870 |
Known Issues
| Issue | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| PowerSchool Admin - Universal Rostering | Universal Rostering endpoints are not automatically updated after 21.4.1.0 upgrade of SIS. More information can be found in this knowledge base article. | PSF-48278 |
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. | 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 | |
|---|---|---|
21.4.0.0 | 21.4.1.0 | |
PowerSchool SIS Server | 21.4.0.0 | 21.4.1.0 |
PowerTeacher Gradebook | 2.8.0.24 | 2.8.0.24 |
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 | 21.5.3.0 |
Report SDK | 1.24.0.0 | 1.25.0.0 |
| Amazon Corretto Java | 1.8u262 | 1.8u262 |