In support of statewide collaboration toward accurate and timely data entry in South Carolina school district PowerSchool instances, the Office of Research and Data Analysis (ORDA) has compiled a list of panel-style questions and answers from PowerSchool Administrators across the state.
This list is intended to reflect ongoing, supportive conversation between users of PowerSchool in SC and will grow and evolve as school district personnel who interact with the PowerSchool Student Information System voice their questions and suggestions; South Carolina PowerSchool Administrators may contact the ORDA Data Collection Team at PowerSchool@ed.sc.gov to request the addition of a question or response to the dialogue.
Questions:
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Creating a PowerSchool Community account is a great place to start when looking for PowerSchool guidance. Here is an example of some “Quick Reference” material from PowerSchool:
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
How to log in.
Enter information correctly the first time, and make sure that your staff is doing the same, as mistakes can be multiplied almost instantaneously. Think about other stakeholders you may be assisting with PowerSchool; make sure that students and others enter and interact with PS correctly and that they access the correct fields.
Grades, attendance, and discipline – ensure correct data entry for these.
Be proactive.
Learn about everything SC specific, especially for 45th & 135th day state reporting.
Ask questions and to read everything received from the South Carolina Department of Education.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Examples of how this is handled within some districts:
Erskine provides week-long training for PowerSchool (PS) folks. Erskine has their own version of PS procedures accessible to their staff; includes a list of resources with links to other places where the information can also be found.
Orangeburg County School District has a TEAMS group established and in that group, we provide step by step instructions for all tasks.
Anonymous school district: We provide training and resources through the PowerSchool District admin office.
PowerSchool User Group (PSUG) training can help you connect with fellow users in your area and share best practices. The PSUG Network has a number of regional groups that coordinate conferences and training.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Districts often offer help via the SIS List Serve.
PowerSchool Support (enter a support case).
Use PowerSchool Community.
Districts need to set up peer partners within the district.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Start a PowerSchool ticket (open a case) for PowerSchool support. In some cases, suggestions could be:
Try restarting server.
Try turning customizations off and on again.
Reach out to the Data Collection Team at SCDE in ORDA if you need an urgent case escalated: PowerSchool@ed.sc.gov
Have a district set of procedures to look at the data and see if it is clean (an internal auditing process).
Make sure you are on the latest version of state reporting.
Update your configuration and try again.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Example: Our district assigns peer partners.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Marion avoids them if possible; if they break something, that takes time and resources you may not have.
Lex One has inherited a lot of customizations; usually they are created because a district wanted to do something that you couldn’t do in PS.
Erskine has noticed that sometimes they can’t be removed once they are there; they’ve inherited a lot too; advice - if it can’t be done as a plugin or API, they don’t recommend doing it.
Anonymous: There are items our district would like to collect that are not in PS.
Answers from ORDA Data Collection Team:
We will soon be offering free and virtual PowerSchool in SC training that can be completed asynchronously. Stay tuned for more info!
Role-based certifications from PowerSchool and school-based training options will be offered soon, as well.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
It helps to encourage new school PowerSchool clerks to shadow an existing seasoned clerk at another school in the district, preferably the same grade band if possible.
Encourage PowerSchool clerks in the same grade band in your district to collaborate on a set procedures and time frames. Month by month is helpful.
Our seasoned clerks work with new clerks for a couple of months.
We tend to place people based on availability and not capability.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Inform school administrators of the data collection schedule and deadlines so that they can understand the time sensitivity and help identify resources to handle other activities or to provide support at times when the PowerSchool work is heavy.
At the beginning of the year, I talk to all the new principles and emphasize why reports need to be correct.
We meet at least once per month away from the school.
In our district, we request that PowerSchool clerks be allowed to work behind closed doors as often as needed. We can only request that this be done.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Some tables have additional fields within that are not highly visible. These fields are things such as:
‘whomodified’, ‘modified date’, ‘userid’, etc.
May need to use Data Export Manager or something like SQL Developer to access these.
Utilize the Change History feature in PowerSchool:
Click System > Change History
There are different categories from which you can select:
Attendance, Class Enrollments, Demographics, School Enrollments, and Stored Grades
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Example: We use Classlink and Clever.
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
Level Data may have a walk-through for Contacts that provides a possible procedure.
Answers from ORDA Data Collection Team:
As a best practice, we make efforts to identify relevant offices when fields or field labels are changed (example: the addition of the nighttime residence field is relevant to district-level homeless coordinators, as well as PowerSchool admin).
Answers from PowerSchool District Administrators in SC:
When multiple SCDE offices are sending our directives and mandates that impact PowerSchool at the same time, it is challenging for district and school staff. This includes webinars.
At least 3 weeks lead time would be appreciated for webinars.
I wonder if the SCDE offices could collaborate to create a master schedule to publish in July?
We have some forthcoming Office Hours sessions on the horizon!
Answers from ORDA Data Collection Team:
Look at the Process Log in Enrich to view errors. The Process Log provides details to help you determine what went wrong.
View the last segment of VC3’s webinar and slides on Enrich Data Collection linked to here below to learn more about what to do if the log suggests issues such as a connectivity problem, duplicate records, timeouts, Oracle errors, or password changes: https://enrichassess.com/enrich-data-collection-webinar-10-27-2021
