PowerSchool Updates Impacting California State Reporting

Date Updated: July 25, 2023

Minimum PowerSchool Version for State Reporting

As of August 15, 2023, PowerSchool State Reporting only supports PowerSchool 23.5.1.2 or higher.

Student Contacts and CA State Reporting

For districts running PowerSchool SIS version 19.4.4 and higher, a new Student Contacts Migration page is available under District Setup > District Info > Student Contact Migration, which provides a new Load Data Export Manager Templates section. This section contains a button to initiate the seeding of three templates. If you have already loaded the templates, a message replaces the button, indicating that the templates are loaded.

When seeding is complete, you have access to three new templates named CA Contact Migration - Step 1 - New Contacts, CA Contact Migration - Step 2 - New Associations, and CA Contact Migration - Step 3 - Legal Guardian Flag, under the My Templates tab in Data Export Manager. These templates select, order, and label the columns in a manner that is compatible with the Data Import Manager.

Step 1 - New Contacts identify students whose Guardian 2's do not already exist in the Person table.

In a situation where a student has an existing contact who matches in name but not the relationship type, a record is included but will be flagged as a potential duplicate.
When two or more students, all related through the Relationship table (Family link under the Information header, share the same Guardian 2 name, each record is given a common New Contact Identifier so that a single new Person record will be created and linked to each student.

Step 2 - New Associations identifies students who do not have an existing contact for their Guardian 2, but a related student has one of the same names.

These records are used to create new associations, linking the students to the existing contacts.

Steps 1 and 2 should be exported, inspected, and modified as needed, and then imported via the Data Import Manager (Import Into = Contacts) before continuing to Step 3.

Step 3 - Legal Guardian Flag generates records to set the Legal Guardian flag for each student's contacts, based on the CALPADS Parent/Guardian 1 and 2 designations.

In addition, if parent/guardian 1 is not already sorted above parent/guardian 2 on the student's list, this sorting is adjusted.

When you are ready to make the switch and use Student Contacts as the source for parent/guardian data in your state reports, navigate to the new Student Contacts Migration page referenced above. This page contains an option that, when selected and submitted, sets a pref record named SRUseContacts. CA state reports use this pref to determine if parent/guardian information is pulled from the Unlimited Contacts tables or Students table extensions.

See the October 2019 State Reporting release notes for additional details.