Common Powerschool issues may influence how your data appear in Schoolzilla.
Discrepancies in School and Class Enrollments
Transfers
- Explanation/Implications: In the beginning of the year, there can be lots of movement in classes and schools, which can cause students to be enrolled multiple times (e.g., students could be simultaneously enrolled in more than one school). This could cause the potential for double counting or other data inaccuracies.
Pre-enrollments
- Explanation/Implications: If parents intend to enroll their student in the district next year, there may be a pre-enrolled status.
- Possible Solution: Make sure the start date is the first day of school, NOT the date they pre-enroll. See below for attendance issues when enrollments are outside of term windows.
No shows
- Explanation: Students who never show up might be counted as enrolled or contribute to the denominators of metrics like suspension rate or chronic absence.
- Possible Solution: Please see our article here on how we handle No Show students by source system and ensure you are appropriately tracking No Show students in Powerschool.
Inaccuracies in Attendance Calculations
Complexity in determining Full Time Equivalency (FTE) and ADA
- Explanation/Implications: Schoolzilla calculates attendance for Powerschool each night using your attendance settings. These include
- Bell schedules and terms,
- FTEs,
- Attendance calculation types and modes (Absent periods counted in Meeting - Day attendance, Code - Day)
- Possible Solutions:
- Determine which mode should be used for daily attendance calculation (Period-to-Day, Minutes-To-Day).
- You can have multiple Full Time Equivalencies (FTE) per school per year.
- Attendance Conversion Items: determine what constitutes Attendance Value for a student on a day.
Example: If FTE X is Period-to-Day, then the corresponding Attendance Conversion needs values for Y periods, based on how many periods are included in the Bell Schedule. If the Bell Schedule has 5 periods, and the student is on a Period-to-Day conversion, the corresponding Attendance Conversion should have 6 items (0-6, inclusive), with values corresponding to what’s considered present or absent. For example:
0 periods present = Attendance Value 0
1 period present = Attendance Value 0
2 periods present = Attendance Value 0.5
3 periods present = Attendance Value 1
4 periods present = Attendance Value 1
5 periods present = Attendance Value 1
6 periods present = Attendance Value 1
Changes after initial set-up
- Explanation/Implications: After initial set up, you may need to change an attendance setting. Because our system only refreshes attendance for the last 60 days by default, changes you make beyond that window will need to be refreshed manually by our team.
- Possible Solutions: If you need to make updates outside of the rolling 60-day window, let our support team know and we can do a full refresh of your attendance data!
Student enrollment start and end dates outside year start and end dates
- Explanation/Implications: If a student is marked as starting school before the school year actually starts, this causes a problem with our attendance calculations from the PSSIS_MEMBERSHIP_DEFAULTS view. For example, a student is marked as enrolling on 2018-08-05, but the school year starts on 2018-08-15.
FTE ID belongs to wrong year or school
- Explanation/Implications: When a student's FTE ID does not match the settings for their school or the current school year, we're unable to calculate their attendance correctly.