PowerSchool SIS 21.11.0.0

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:

• Certain aspects of the user interface (UI), such as the header bar styling and colors, will be uniform across all PowerSchool Products.

• End-user browsers will load some content from http://assets.powerschool.com , which is PowerSchool's Content Delivery Network (CDN) server.

  • Note: Navigating directly to this site will result in a 404 error and is expected.

• The user interface may not completely load for end users without internet access, such as self-hosted customers accessing a local SIS instance during an internet outage.

• Users who customize this part of the system may require an update.

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:

• The Career Tech pages have been renamed Academic and Career Planner, or ACP, throughout the application. This naming better reflects how the course pathways are used in PowerSchool SIS.

• The Program Code field has been renamed to CIP Code or Program Code and now accepts 10 characters. 

• Administrators can now configure the Academic and Career Planner to assign local schools to a created locality.

• Administrators can now assign pathways of courses to an Academic and Career Plan.

Academic and Career Plan

Accessibility

Several enhancements have been made to improve accessibility within the PowerSchool Admin portal, including additional support for the following:

• Screen Readers: Ensuring a screen reader can properly annotate a page for those requiring sight-assistance

• Keyboard Navigation: When using the keyboard to navigate a page, the tab button can access each and every element on the page.

• Color Contrast: Contrast ratios correction done to assist low vision users.

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:

• Search medications by category (example: Category 'Fever' will only show fever-related medication list).

• Search using type-ahead/contains features.

Health Management

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. 

Integration Overview

Naviance Reference Guide

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

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:

• Training Videos Banner

• PowerSource Single Sign-on

• PowerSource Single Sign-on for Admin

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.

Reminder: PowerTeacher Gradebook will be removed from PowerSchool SIS with the Back-to-School release (Spring 2022). 

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

PowerSchool - Admin

The following link names under Page and Data Management have changed: 

• Data Import Manager: Import Data

• Data Import Queue: Import Queue

• Templates for Importing: Import Templates

• Data Export Manager: Export Data 

• Templates for Exporting: Export Templates 

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

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

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