Overview
We have a file-based connection to FOCUS in which we work with the educational data agencies to set up a nightly drop for a district's files to a secure FTP (SFTP) site.
Schoolzilla creates an FTP site and provides the data agency with the secure credentials. Once the data files are added to the FTP (more information below), then a nightly job will be set up so that the SIS data are refreshed on a nightly basis. We currently work with Panhandle Area Educational Consortium (PAEC) but have the scripts that another educational data agency could use and modify as necessary for their districts.
Note: Given limitations in the data available from FOCUS, there are some limitations in the grades data we are able to provide in Schoolzilla. Our connector does not currently support the Credits Earned, Course Failures by Grading Period, nor Term/Grade Period GPA metrics, and transfer courses are not included.
Setting up exports for current year data
Use a tool like Cyberduck (for Macs) or FileZilla (For PCs) to connect to an SFTP site set up for you by Schoolzilla using credentials provided. If you have not been provided credentials to your SFTP site, please contact support. The list of expected files is shown below.
Setting up exports for historical data
We can accept up to 5 years of data, so it is good if you can provide at least three years of data. If you need to import any historical data outside of the current year, this data can be dropped on the SFTP site (see information in current year above) in a folder named for the given year. Reach out to your implementation specialist once this data is there. Schoolzilla does not process historical data nightly, so we would need to manually trigger the data to be imported. In the screen shot below, the 2020-2021 school data is in the 2020 folder and the other folders contain historical data.