Blogs

Funding is always a major concern for schools and making sure they're getting all the funding available is especially important.

One area of particular concern is funding based on a student's poverty status. In many instances, this information is based on a student's lunch status field.

Making sure that data is accurate is of significant importance as it not only affects reimbursement for meals but can also impact funding areas such as title and e-rate reimbursement.

Unfortunately for schools, this data is often stored in multiple places, so making sure the data is accurate is even more complicated. 

Districts often enter test scores into PowerSchool whether this means SAT or ACT scores at the high school, state testing scores for elementary or middle school students, placement test data for specific subject areas, or any other test scores that need to be available for review.

PowerSchool allows for the ability to enter this data for each individual student. Reviewing the data by students has always been the easy part. 

In many ways, attendance reporting has become a complicated and time-consuming process. It's no longer as simple as just marking students as absent or tardy and adding them up.

Attendance reporting now requires schools to not only show attendance totals for students but also to be broken down into a multitude of various categories. One such area includes defining the attendance data based on the student's lunch status.

There is no question that oodles and oodles of cash have been flowing into local school districts nationwide recently thanks to federal legislation through the American Rescue Plan.

These funds are targeted at supporting demographically underserved students and numerous other education efforts to mitigate the toughest challenges of Covid-19 recovery.

Disciplined data is one area that schools strive to keep accurate and up to data records.

Log entries are just one of the methods available to users.

The benefit of using logs is that schools can store more than just discipline entries. While common uses may revolve around areas such as discipline, parent and/or student contact, or even health records.

Schools can choose to use log entries to track an unlimited number of topics, set up log types, subtypes entry screens, or even creating log entries themselves is really the easy part.

Once entered though, getting to that data in a quick and easy manner is a little more complicated. That is until now. With the use of our log entry report, schools can now access student log records with just a few simple clicks.

Retrieving daily attendance records is a common practice in schools but for schools that use meeting attendance, trying to determine if a student was considered absent or present at a daily level is nearly impossible for everyday users.

If they can somehow figure out a student's attendance status for a given date, trying to then gather summary data of how many times a student was absent or present is even more complicated.

But now with the use of our Daily Attendance Summary by Date Report, schools can retrieve aggregated daily attendance values for students and easily filter the data by date range, calculated attendance value, and even the number of occurrences for each.

How often are your staff tasked with looking up students' current grades? What about generating at-risk reports or eligibility lists for participating in activities? What hoops do they have to jump through to get to this data and how long does it actually take?

Wouldn't it be great if you could get to this data with just a few simple clicks? Well, now you can with the use of our gradebook grades analysis.

This type of report is just a few clicks away. 

“Houston, we have a problem.”

Storing student transportation data has always been an option within PowerSchool. Identifying if a student is a car rider, bus rider, or uses some other means of transportation has been possible by populating that data to each student's individual transportation screen.

However, getting to that data for more than a single student at a time has been a different story altogether.

Creating a list of basics such as which students are car riders on a given day or which students ride bus 9, has never been easy because of how the data is stored. But now with the use of our Transportation Report, getting to that data can be quick and easy. 

Contract tracing has taken a prominent role in the life of many school administrators while the information they need to identify students that have been in close contact with other students is often contained in PowerSchool.

Being able to access that data quickly and easily in a usable way is a different story.