Attendance Reports Troubleshooting Checklist

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Curtis Loo

Below is checklist of the most common types of items that can create problems in your Monthly Student Attendance Reports (MARS). This is true for the Monthly Student Attendance and Attendance Summary by Grade reports in PowerSchool.

  • Is your attendance conversion accurate?
  • Is your Full Time Equivalency properly defined? (That is, all grade levels have an FTE defined?)
  • Is the school calendar setup?
  • Are your bell schedule periods checked to count for attendance properly?
  • Do all your students have a Full Time Equivalency defined? (No one should have an empty “FTEID” value)
  • Entry date
    • Students entry date into PowerSchool (“EntryDate”) should match entry date into their classes (“DateEnrolled” in the CC table) for the first day of school
      • For schedule changes after Day 1 of school, the DateLeft from the old class(es) should be equal to the DateEnrolled of the new class(es)
  • Exit date
    • The exit date from PowerSchool (“ExitDate”) should be the day after the last day of school. The exit date from classes, likewise, should be the day after the last day of school.
  • Attendance codes
    • Are your attendance codes checked to count towards an Attendance Category?
  • Refresh Daily Attendance view
    • Run this function to force PowerSchool to refresh attendance for a given date range
      • (Start page > Special Functions > Attendance functions > Refresh Premier Attendance Views Data
  • Re-calculate attendance (experts only)
    • Run this function (only if you are comfortable with advance functionality in PowerSchool) to force PowerSchool to recalculate attendance for the entire school
Posted in PowerSchool, Reports | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

What does your school need to do to access Common Core Implementation Funding?

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Curtis Loo

Now that it is known that AB 86 creates a significant amount of funding for schools to utilize technology services and products for student performance, what are the conditions to receiving those funds?

According to the text of AB 86:

  • Develop and adopt a plan delineating how funds allocated pursuant to this section shall be spent. The plan shall be explained in a public meeting of the governing board of the school district, county board of education, or governing body of the charter school, before its adoption in a subsequent public meeting.
  • On or before July 1, 2015, report detailed expenditure information to the State Department of Education, including, but not limited to, specific purchases made and the number of teachers, administrators, or paraprofessional educators that received professional development. The State Department of Education shall determine the format for this report.
Posted in Funding, Student Performance | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

$1.25 billion in new CA Funding can help you build Student Performance Systems in 13-14

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Curtis Loo

On July 1st, 2013, The Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown approved California Assembly Bill 86 which allocates 1.25 billion dollars for Common Core Implementation Funding that can integrate “academic content standards through technology-based instruction for purposes of improving the academic performance of pupils.”

What does that mean for your charter school?

  • Approximately $200/ADA from 12-13 P-2 ADA becomes available to schools.  Depending on your attendance rate, that translates to up to $20,000 per 100 students!
  • If you are shopping for an SIS or testing software platform, the 13-14 school year is a great time to put those systems in place.  If there is not enough time for this year, you can budget for that implementation in 14-15.
  • If you already have an SIS or testing platform invested in, your school can now invest in a REPORTING SYSTEM that MEASURES STUDENT PERFORMANCE

DDFS’s Data Schoolhouse™ solution for schools can do exactly that by building a CUSTOM solution to integrate with your Student Information System (SIS), Assessment Software, and just about any other data source to bring INTEGRATED student performance insights to your school leaders, teachers and students!

This funding is lost after the 14-15 school year, so schools should start now to make a two year plan for the allocation of those funds!

Posted in Data SchoolHouse, Funding, SIS, Student Performance | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Importing Sections into PowerSchool for Summer school

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Curtis Loo

If you are setting up Summer school now, some of those system requirements used at the beginning of the school year might come into play and could create issues when setting up your sections. Here is a brief reminder of a couple of them:

1)       Remember to set up your school Calendar before loading sections. This is particularly true if you did not originally create the summer school term in your system at the beginning of the school year

2)      You may have to change the “Atomic Sync” settings in order for you sections to import. To do this, go to Home Page > System > Special Operations. The values should be:

  1. Set “Operation Value” to “Set Synch To Non-Atomic Mode”.

i.      Leave “Param 1”, “Param 2” and “Code” blank.

  1. After you import sections, change the “Operation Value” back to “Set Synch To Atomic Mode”.

i.      Leave “Param 1”, “Param 2” and “Code” blank.

 SpecialOperationsPowerSchool

 

 

Posted in PowerSchool, SIS | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Introducing Data Schoolhouse™

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Curtis Loo

DDFS is proud to announce a brand new service for the 13-14 school year that will revolutionize how schools access big data.

Have you ever:

  • wondered what areas of the school/teachers/staff/students can be improved?
  • wished that your school data would be accessible, up to date, and easy to manipulate?
  • had a hypothesis about your school and didn’t have the right tools to quantify AND communicate your reasons for action to other school leaders?

Data Schoolhouse™ is finally here and will allow your school to:

  • track and measure your school’s unique metrics for success
  • integrate multiple data systems in one place
  • have reports you care about accessible through the web, desktop or email
  • affordable for small schools

We invite you to try our interactive “Lost ADA Report” to get a sense of what is possible with Attendance, but we have many more reports in store for you that target:

  • Student/School/Teacher Performance
  • Demographics
  • API/AYP
  • Formative Assessments
  • Discipline
  • Board Meetings
  • …and more to come!
Posted in Blog, Data SchoolHouse, Reports | Tagged , , | 1 Comment