Contacts

This category represents information about parents/guardians and their relationships to students as published in the Parent resource within the Contacts category. The Contacts category includes the following data views and resources:

Student Contacts

This view captures the demographic record for each student contact as published in the Parent resource within the Contacts category. It includes each contact associated with a student in PowerSchool who was included for publishing in the Student resource. The layout includes School Name, Contact ID, Student Contact Name, and Contact Unique ID.

Each contact must first have an assigned Unique Person Identifier (Unique ID) in order for the contact record to be published. At his time, a Unique ID is automatically assigned to each contact. In turn, the publishing of the related StudentParentAssociation resource is dependent on the successful publishing of the contact record; as needed, use the Publishing Errors data view to identify and resolve any issues.

Automatic Creation of Student Contact Records

The Ed-Fi process automatically creates contact records for students that do not already have at least one contact record defined within PowerSchool. This functionality is invoked each time a school or district uses the Ed-Fi dashboard to publish student contacts.

If a student does not already have at least one student contact and relationship, the Ed-Fi process leverages the existing mother and father fields defined in the Students table, parses the fields to create separate contact records for each, and populates the PowerSchool student contacts table with the new records. If the mother and father fields cannot be successfully parsed, no contact record is created. Instead, the district/school must manually create the needed contact records.

Only first and last names are parsed. The relationship is assumed to be mother if data is derived from the mother column, or father when derived from the father column. Once the new student contact records are created, the district/school can then update any field on the contact record to adjust the relationship or name information, or to add other related data as appropriate.

The mother/father field parsing routine uses the following business logic:

• A valid name may contain alphabetic characters, a comma, apostrophes, and hyphens. Any other characters or punctuation will cause the field to be unusable (skipped).
• If a comma is found, everything before the comma is assumed to be the last name (and possible generation suffix). Everything after the comma is considered the first name.
• If a comma is not found, then the field is not parsed.
• If the mother and father fields both contain the same information, the father field is bypassed in order to prevent the creation of two identical contact records.
• It is not an error if parsing fails on both the mother and father fields. This is only an indication that the software cannot automate the creation of contacts for a student, and the district/school must manually create the student contact record.

When a new Student Contact record is created, the following fields are populated:

• Contacts table: S_CONTACTS_S
  • Last Name
  • First Name
  • Gender
• Relationships table: S_CONTACT_RELATIONSHIP_C
  • Relationship
  • Primary Contact (flag is populated for mother if mother exists; if not, then father)

parents

This resource represents a parent or guardian of a student, such as mother, father, or caretaker.

Primary PowerSchool Source Data

• [S_CONTACTS_S]

Selection Criteria

Records are published if the following criteria are met:

• The contact is associated with a student who qualifies for publishing (based on having a valid school enrollment in the year for the Term selected in the PowerSchool UI).
• Contact Unique ID must be populated.
• The contact must not be excluded from state reporting.
• Contact FirstName and LastName must be populated.

Resource Output

• A separate record is published for each parent or guardian associated with a student who qualifies for publishing.
• The Parent resource is not dependent on the prior publishing of other Ed-Fi resources.
• LEAs and Schools may upload (publish) data to the ODS in real time or on-demand ("Run Now" button).

Note: Click Export to export the data collection results to an Excel spreadsheet.

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Student Associations

This view captures the associations of contacts to students as published in the StudentParentAssociation resource within the Parent category. The layout includes School Name, Contact ID, Student Contact Name, Contact Unique ID, Relationship, Student Number, Student Name, and UIC.

studentParentAssociations

This resource relates students to their parents, guardians, or caretakers.

Primary PowerSchool Source Data

• [S_CONTACT_RELATIONSHIP_C]

• [S_MI_STU_GC_X]

Selection Criteria

Records are published if the following criteria are met:

• Both the Student and Parent were previously published in the Student and Parent resources.

Resource Output

• A separate StudentParentAssociation record is published for each unique Student/Parent combination included in the Student and Parent resources.
• The StudentParentAssociation resource is dependent on the prior publishing of the following resources: Student and Parent.
• LEAs and Schools may upload (publish) data to the ODS in real time or on-demand ("Run Now" button).

Note: Click Export to export the data collection results to an Excel spreadsheet.

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