Print version of this manual (PDF).
|
|
PowerSchool SMS 8.4.3
Administration Manual
Copyright 2015-2016 PowerSchool Group LLC and/or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. All trademarks are either owned or licensed by PowerSchool Group LLC and/or its affiliates.
Build: 4/11/2016
This document is a reference for the user of a district's or a school's PowerSchool SMS system, including the following types of people:
| = | District Administrator: Configures and maintains the PowerSchool SMS system for a district. This involves setting up district-wide information, setting up system users and their roles, setting information standards for all schools, setting district and school boundaries, adding schools to the district and setting them up, setting up programs, configuring year-end reporting, and defining how schools operate. Typical District Administrators hold such positions as IT manager, data analyst, database manager, assistant superintendent. See also Base roles [>>]. |
| = | School Administrator: Maintains the PowerSchool SMS system for one or more schools in the same district. This involves such tasks as scheduling courses and classes, configuring grading, enrolling students, assigning teachers, validating addresses, tracking immunizations, adjusting student information, and assembling student information for various administrative purposes. A School Administrator may do this work for more than one school. Typical School Administrators hold such positions as school IT manager, vice-principal, office data specialist. See also Base roles [>>]. |
| = | Technician: Involved in general system maintenance [>>] including the installation, upgrading, and data management. |
Note: The ability to run Year-End Processing [>>] is available in this version of PowerSchool SMS
Note:This document may describe some tasks, processes, and features that are not available to your role [>>].
Registration and Enrollment
There is a new "Use requested school for retained students" setting on the Registration and Enrollment Preferences page. When this preference is selected, a school or district administrator can project retained students into their current grade level at their requested school. This requested school can be their current school or a different school [>>].
Server Certification
ParentCONNECTxp 4.5 and PowerTeacher for SMS 2.8.1 are now certified to run on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 [>>].
ART/AQ
Districts can upgrade to a newer version of Advanced Reporting Toolkit (ART) when Advanced Query (AQ) is already installed, as well as upgrade AQ when ART is already installed.
ParentCONNECTxp4.5
| = | In PowerSchool SMS, District Administrators can control ParentCONNECTxp users' ability to add, edit and view home and employment addresses [>>]. |
| = | ParentCONNECTxp 4.5 provides multi-language functionality. In AdminApp, a ParentCONNECTxp administrator can enable two new languages: Spanish and Russian. When either or both of these languages is enabled, a language selector appears on the Member Sign In page (the indicator always includes English). If neither language is enabled, ParentCONNECTxp defaults to English and does not display the language selector. For details, see ParentCONNECTxp 4.5 Administrator's Guide |
| = | In AdminApp, a ParentCONNECTxp administrator can create custom labels in Spanish and Russian in the same manner that labels are customized in English. |
Registration
When a school-level user attempts to enroll a new student and selects “Match” when prompted, but the student is already enrolled at another school and the district does not allow schools to edit other school's student registration and contact information
Enrollment preferences [see Student enrollment setup >>]
| = | The minimum enrollment age |
| = | Districts can choose to prevent schools from editing other schools' student registration or contact information |
| = | A new option |
Roles
| = | Users with the role [>>] of School Counselor now have access to the District Setup page. Elementary school counselors can work with the District Course Catalog on the District Setup page, while secondary school counselors can work with both the District Course Catalog and Academic Plan Setup. When a School Counselor clicks the Course Catalog link, the Course Catalog Home page appears and displays only the Courses link. |
Advanced Query
The Advanced Query [>>] feature enables district and school administrators to create queries that enable users to search across multiple schemas for data in most fields in PowerSchool SMS and then display that data - the query results - in a grid of columns you specify. If you have many queries, they can be organized by user-defined categories.
Filters [>>] can be created separately and then added to queries to provide a choice of multiple search refinements.
To ensure system performance is not negatively affected by the running of queries, District Administrators can set preferences [>>] that determine when certain queries can be run.
A District Administrator can create and modify queries used across the district. With the appropriate permissions [>>], a School Administrator can create queries for his or her school.
Attendance
| = | When the "Collect attendance" option is not selected on the district Course Detail page, the attendance icon does not appear for any class associated with that course. This functionality applies to secondary scheduling class attendance and secondary daily attendance with supplementary class attendance. |
Enrollment
| = | There is a new dialog on the Enrollment page that enables a District Administrator who is enrolling a student to select that student’s grade level and enter an effective date. The dialog only appears if the student has had past enrollments in the district but no current or future enrollments and the school in which the student is being enrolled does not support the student's grade level for the date of enrollment [>>]. |
Staff Management
| = | For duplicate staff records on the Staff List page,  appears beside a record that is not to be used. The record with the most current data that should be used is indicated with a yellow star ( ) or does not contain . |
Search Control
| = | For both school and district administrators, there is the option to select a new “Requested School” column, which displays students’ Planning Calendar requested schools in search results. |
| = | State Number can be added to a grid to display the student's state number in student search results. |
As a District Administrator, when you add a list item to the Staff Data > Teacher Class Role setup list [>>] in PowerSchool SMS there is a "No access to gradebook" option that enables you to prevent access to PowerTeacher gradebook for that role. If a school user selects this role for a teacher (other than the lead teacher) on the Class Setup or Master Schedule page [>>], the teachers assigned this role will not have access to PowerTeacher. Note: You cannot prevent access to PowerTeacher for the default Teacher of Record role.
Supported software
With version 8.2.1, PowerSchool SMS now supports the following versions of Windows Server and SQL Server (in addition to previously supported versions) [>>]:
| = | Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP1 64-bit |
| = | Microsoft Windows Server 2012 64-bit |
Attendance
| = | To save time and avoid potential data entry errors, a district user can now enter an attendance exception day of Inclement Weather or Unforeseen Disaster and apply that exception day to all schools within the district or to a subset of schools in the district |
Calendars
| = | The new Access to Planning Calendar permission has been added to control whether PowerSchool SMS displays the Active and Planning calendar buttons. If the permission is set to No, then the buttons do not display and the user is prevented from working in the Planning Calendar. [>>] |
Classes
| = | On the Classes page, only those columns that are applicable for the calendar and the scheduling method will be available in Choose Columns or Sort [>>]. For example, the Class Number field is not applicable for elementary schools in the active or the planning calendar and therefore will not display in the list of available fields in the list mover on the Choose Columns or Sort page. |
| = | On the Classes page, when multiple classes are selected and you click the Grading icon or Class name link, only the pre-selected classes display on the new page, rather than all classes as with previous versions [>>]. |
District Setup
| = | The Person Generation setup list, introduced in PowerSchool SMS 8.0, is enhanced to provide district users with a way to merge the setup list items Table 135 [>>]. With the merge functionality, you can combine duplicates and, if necessary, remove erroneous data. Note:The School Selection option has been removed from the Person Generation setup list (and others) because it is no longer used. |
Permanent Record
| = | On the Permanent Record Summary Data page, you can now view the cumulative GPA definition used to calculate the class rank. |
Scheduling
| = | A new default search-by set has been added to the search on the Master Schedule so that you can quickly perform a lookup based on course number (rather than selecting course number from the list of available fields to search on) [>>]. |
| = | When planning for the next year in a secondary school, you may be working with multiple planning schedules. The planning schedule name now displays next to the Active/Planning buttons [Figure 179] |
Student Search
| = | A district user can now select the option to include All Students when performing a search, or choose to filter students based on other criteria, such as whether the student is Active, Incoming, Withdrawn (current year), or Withdrawn (past years). |
| = | When you select filters for a quick search, the pre-selected filters appear in the drop down list of students [Figure 31]. |
| = | You can now search for students that are not in a School Student saved list by using the Not Equal operator. This allows you to find those students who may have been missed when performing a particular action or assignment [>>]. |
Enrollment
| = | A school user can modify past year's enrollment records for the students at their school by opening a student's record from the Past Years' student search results [>>]. |
| = | If the district prohibits concurrent enrollment, only users at the student's school can edit the student's demographic record when it is opened from the Registration/Enrollment search results. |
Student Behavior
| = | Districts can choose to use the standard Student Behavior functionality or a new version, Student Behavior Lite, which offers simplified Behavior Incident and Action pages as well as a new dialog with which to add persons involved [>>]. This version still provides tie-ins to registration and enrollment, attendance, and students receiving specialized services. Districts currently using the standard Student Behavior feature can switch to the new Student Behavior Lite feature. |
Usability
| = | A District Administrator can configure the PowerSchool SMSSupport link so that users are directed to a website of the district's choosing [>>]. |
| = | After 15 minutes of inactivity in PowerSchool SMS, a session timeout warning dialog appears and displays a 5 minute countdown, after which time the session ends and the sign-in page appears [>>]. The default for the session timeout is 20 minutes (15 minutes of inactivity, with a 5 minute countdown). The District Administrator can change this default |
| = | In the Role > Switch Role menu, there is a new Edit List... link that enables you to navigate directly to the User Settings > Roles page [Figure 5]. |
| = | You can now collapse and expand the header and footer areas of PowerSchool SMS to allow a larger work space on the page [>>]. When you sign out and then back in, the system defaults to the expanded header and footer. |
| = | In the My Reports menu, there is a new Edit List... link that enables you to navigate directly to the User Settings > Reports page [Figure 12]. |
| = | To provide more room on the student demographics page, the header text "Demographics" has been removed. |
Year-End Processing
| = | Year-End Processing performance has been improved, the process has been tested, and districts can run YEP in this version of PowerSchool SMS. |
Online Contact Editing
| = | There is a new Online contact editing indicator on the Edit Contact page in PowerSchool SMS. When this indicator is selected, the contact can add, update, or delete contact information in ParentCONNECTxp for their associated student, and then submit contact update requests to PowerSchool SMS [>>] for approval. |
Note: A public key certificate (also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate) is required for internal message encryption for the online contact editing web service. For detailed instructions on obtaining and installing a public key certificate, see the ParentCONNECTxp Installation and Setup Guide.
| = | On the Detail tab of the Advanced Student Search page [>>] under the Student Contact category, you can select Online Contact Editing to search for students with contacts who have the Online contact editing indicator selected. |
| = | There are two new online contact editing permissions: Online Contact Update Request Approval [>>] and Online Contact Request Status Report [>>]. The first permission controls a PowerSchool SMS user's ability to approve or reject online requests for updates to contact information sent from ParentCONNECTxp; the second permission controls a PowerSchool SMS user's ability to run the Online Contact Request Status Report. |
| = | If your role is School Administrator and you have the appropriate permissions [>>], the following functionality is available: |
An Online Contact Update Requests option on the School menu provides access to the Online Contact Update Request page, where you can process requests from ParentCONNECTxp users for updates to contact information [>>].
When a new contact update request is submitted, a notification in the form of a link to the Online Contact Update Request page appears on your home page.
| = | A new Online Contact Requests Status Report [>>] enables you to report on the status of online contact update requests sent from ParentCONNECTxp to PowerSchool SMS. |
Scheduling
| = | You can now define course request rules (that is, course request eligibility criteria) to specify the course requests a student should receive in their Planning Schedule. When you apply a course request rule, PowerSchool SMS assigns required course requests to the Planning Calendar schedules of students who match the eligibility criteria of the rule [>>]. |
Note: The ability to run Year-End Processing [>>] is not available in this version of PowerSchool SMS.
This section describes new capabilities in PowerSchool SMS 8.0.1.
Academic Planner
| = | You can now set an option for an academic plan so that when the credits requirement is met by the courses in a subgroup, any other subgroups under the same parent group do not appear on the student Academic Plan page. You can also group the courses in an academic plan by a particular course attribute for the purpose of gathering credits |
Audit Log
| = | Information about manually added, edited, or deleted historical teachers is available in the Database Audit Log. |
Contacts
| = | A Verify Address button on the Add/Edit Contact page enables you to check the accuracy of a contact's address against Google Maps [>>]. |
Enrollment
| = | When you attempt to delete a student record from the district, PowerSchool SMS checks for active enrollment records at all schools and does not allow the deletion if any are found. |
| = | You can update enrollment information for multiple students at one time [>>]. A new "Assign Status Codes" permission controls the ability to use this functionality |
| = | On the Enrollments page, in the Enrollment History panel, the Grade Level column lists grade levels for an enrollment separately rather than in a consolidated format [Figure 155]. If a student has repeated a grade level, that grade level appears twice. |
| = | The student's School of Enrollment displays in the search results grid on the Registration/Enrollment Search page. If the student is enrolled in more than one school, the student's home school is displayed. This field displays by default but can be removed through the Grid view Edit link. |
Grading
| = | You can use the backfill grades functionality to enter grades for a student who drops a class, then returns to the same course but a different class [>>]. |
| = | On the Student Grades page, there is a new icon to the right of the course name. When you move your cursor over the icon, the teacher name, term, meeting pattern and room number appear [Figure 73]. |
Historical / Year-End Processing (YEP)
| = | The Teacher field on the historical Course page is an editable grid that displays active and inactive teacher information for the course, including role and start and end dates. |
| = | The Teacher column on the historical Course List page includes each teacher's class role and start and end dates. |
| = | During YEP, the teacher's class role and start and end dates for each course are copied into the historical Course List page and into each student's historical Course page. |
Permanent Record
Grading-PR
Using a new search grid in the cumulative GPA page, you can search for courses to determine if a course is included in the GPA calculation.
| = | Historical-PR |
There is a new "Edit Historical Course Teacher Assignment Grid" permission [>>] that controls access to adding, editing, and deleting information for the new teacher assignment grid on the Add/Edit Historical Course page.
| = | Year-end Processing-PR |
YEP rolls over a student's class rank value for his/her most recent school and grade level, where appropriate.
Scheduling
| = | Inactive students in a class appear in italics on the Class Roster page. |
| = | On the Master Schedule page, the Delete Classes option in the Actions menu is changed to Delete Classes/Class Schedules. |
| = | On the Master Schedule page, an Effective date link appears above the course grid when the #of Students column is displayed [Figure 411]. This link enables you to select an effective date for the Master Schedule you are viewing and updates the number of students to reflect the date selected. |
| = | On the Course Request Tally page, there are three check boxes that enable you to include or exclude Active, Incoming and Withdrawn students in the Course Request Tally search results. |
| = | On the Course Request Tally > Student List page, inactive students appear in italics. |
| = | On the Classes page, the Roster column is replaced by the # Students column, which now displays the number of students in the class as a numbered link; clicking this link opens the Class Roster page [Figure 10]. |
| = | Choose columns and Sort are available in the Edit menu on the Classes page. |
Staff
| = | On the Staff Scheduling Properties page, the list of rooms in the Available Rooms list on the Room Preferences panel is in alphabetical and numerical order. |
Student Demographics
| = | The name of the Home School (Active) field is changed to Home School on the School Specific, Overview, and Personal Info tabs, and in the Assign Values dialog. |
Student Search
| = | On the Home > Quick Search page for district roles, there are new Active, Incoming, Withdrawn (current year) and Withdrawn (past years) check boxes. On the Home > Quick Search page for school roles there are Active, Incoming, and Withdrawn (current year) [Figure 30]. These check boxes enable you to filter quick search choices. When you select one or multiple check boxes, only the students for the option(s) you selected appear in the list of students available for selection from the quick search drop down list. |
| = | For a district role, if you deselect all check boxes, PowerSchool SMS searches amongst all students. |
| = | For a school role, if you deselect all check boxes, no matching students are found. |
| = | When signed in as a District Administrator, you can search for students by enrollment date or enrollment status from the Advanced Search page. |
| = | On the Advanced Search page, the search criteria panel closes after the search results display. |
User interface
| = | The PowerSchool SMS interface has new colors [Figure 6], an altered layout, and a more efficient menu system. |
| = | PowerSchool SMS uses color to distinguish more clearly the Active Calendar from the Planning Calendar [>>]. |
User roles
| = | You can change to another role more easily [>>]. |
Course requests
| = | You can specify which of a student's contacts can approve that student's course requests [Table 15]. |
School setup
| = | You can change calendars more easily [>>]. |
Registration and enrollment
| = | The process of registering and enrolling a student is more streamlined. As part of the process, PowerSchool SMS scans the system for potential duplicate students [>>] and you can assign contacts to the registrant. |
| = | When you try to enroll a student who has behavior enrollment restrictions, PowerSchool SMS prevents the enrollments and displays a warning. |
| = | When you try to enroll a student who is under the minimum age, PowerSchool SMS displays a warning. |
| = | When you try to enroll a student in an out-of-zone school or in a school where program management is employed, PowerSchool SMS sets the enrollment to "pending" [>>]. |
| = | Rather than transferring a student mid-year by selecting Transfer Students from the Actions menu, you withdraw the student from one school and enroll that student in the other [>>]. |
| = | You can view and manage a student's enrollments more efficiently [Figure 1]. |
| = | As a District Administrator, you can specify which fields are required and add custom fields |
| = | For District Setup purposes, as a District Administrator you can now use a dedicated Registration and Enrollment preferences page [>>]. |
| = | PowerSchool SMS now stores enrollment data as records with start and end dates (rather than as a collection of status codes). |
| = | New permissions control aspects of registration and enrollment |
Contacts
| = | PowerSchool SMS displays more information about contacts [Table 15] [>>] [>>]. Information displayed includes each student's emergency contact, communication methods, pickup rights, custody, and course request approval status. |
| = | For a contact, you can record new information, including new communication methods such as an e-mail address and a Facebook URL, a permission-to-pick-up phrase, and the nature of the contact's relationship with the student [>>]. |
| = | You can click a contact's e-mail address to start composing an e-mail. |
| = | You can link a student's sibling to that student as a contact [>>]. |
| = | You can link any contact stored on the system to a student as a contact [>>]. |
| = | When adding a contact to a student, PowerSchool SMS identifies potential duplicates [>>]. |
| = | You need record a student contact only once and then it is available to associate to more than one student [>>]. |
| = | When you record a new contact, PowerSchool SMS scans the system for potential duplicates [>>]. |
Scheduling
| = | You can see which user made a change to a student's schedule. |
| = | For systems converted to Permanent Record, the PR Summary page uses the updated view to return the class rank for students based on their most recent home school and grade level. |
Product name change
| = | For version 8.0, the product name Chancery SMS is changed to PowerSchool SMS. Since references to Chancery SMS might persist in the product or these documents, the reader should consider these names equivalent. |
Server support
| = | For its Web and Database Servers, PowerSchool SMS now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit [>>]. |
If in the course of your work, you need information on some aspect of the system, you can get that information quickly. You can get detailed information on PowerSchool SMS in general or access to a user support website.
To get information on PowerSchool SMS:
| 1 | Click Help in the top right corner of the screen. PowerSchool SMS8.4.3 eDocs appears in your web browser. |
| = | You can find specific information using the table of contents or index, or by text search. Tip: To filter a text search, use quotation marks (" ") around the word or phrase you are searching for. |
| = | Some documents within Help require the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader (http://get.adobe.com/reader). |
To view the user support site:
| 1 | Click Support in the top right corner of the screen. The login page opens in your web browser. |
| = | For access to the support site, you must have a User ID and Password issued by your organization. The User ID determines the services to which you have access. |
For assistance with technical aspects of a district's PowerSchool SMS system, such as installation
As a further source of assistance, we offer several user support options, which are available by subscription (that is, to personnel within an organization that has a support agreement in place). Options include access to a technical support engineer and access to PowerSource, the user support site: https://support.powerschool.com. PowerSource contains information and services such as a knowledge base, user forums, technical bulletins, downloads, documentation for older PowerSchool SMS versions, and tracking of support incidents set up by support technicians.
To consult a support technical support engineer:
Telephone 866-434-6276.
| = | Telephone service is available Monday to Friday, between 5 am and 4 pm Pacific Time. |
| = | Or email smssupport@powerschool.com |
For the District Administrator or Technician, training may be an appropriate means of learning how to work with a PowerSchool SMS system. Experienced users interested in mastering new aspects of a system may also benefit from in-depth information and proven techniques that training provides.
Training programs on PowerSchool SMS are available in several formats, including on-site and live online. Also available is custom training designed for a specific district's system.
|
Note: Documentation not listed here is integrated with eDocs; use Find to locate information |
|
|
|
|
Other | |
|
|
www.powerschool.com
Tel: 866-434-6276
Email: smssupport@powerschool.com
Copyright 2015-2016 PowerSchool Group LLC and/or its affiliate(s). All rights reserved. All trademarks are either owned or licensed by PowerSchool Group LLC and/or its affiliates.
