OnSIS Reporting Process and Best Practices

This article documents the entire OnSIS Reporting Process and identifies some best practices that Districts should consider implementing to successfully complete their OnSIS submissions. 

Initial OnSIS Configuration and Setup for a New Client

• Ensure that the configurations and setup on the district level are complete. Refer to DistrictSetup-EnteringProvincialDistrictInformation
  • District Number must be set to Board's BSID
  • For each course that is reported to the Ministry, ensure that the alternate course number contains the five-digit Ministry secondary course code (e.g., ENG1D, SBI4U) or six-digit Ministry elementary subject code (e.g., LAN-10, MAT-20, OPT-10)
  • For each School, ensure the appropriate information is entered:
    • Alternate School Number must be set to the School's BSID
    • 'Is a Night (Continuing Education) School' checked for night/continuing education schools
    • 'ECPP Flag', 'Designated School' and or 'Designated School (Elem)' and 'Care Treatment Program Type' set for all ECPP sites

• Ensure that the setup for the OSSLT Tests is complete.  Refer to the District Setup page and search for Defining Tests, this applies to Secondary Schools.

OnSIS Configuration and Setup

Before running the OnSIS reports:

• Ensure you are on the latest PowerSchool State Reporting version, which includes the latest changes required for the current OnSIS Submission.
• Ensure that the OnSIS Reporting dates have been updated to reflect the appropriate count date for this school year's OnSIS submission. 
• Ensure that the 'Number of Previous OnSIS Snapshots to Retain' is set to a value that will cover at least two years of submissions (e.g. 4 submissions per year), allowing you to access this information if OnSIS data corrections are needed.
• Ensure that the OnSIS Snapshot report is scheduled to run on the count dates. This report can run manually but it is highly recommended to use the schedule option for this report to make sure it runs on the count date. 

Running Late Completing Last Year's OnSIS Submissions?

• You still need to ensure that the Demographic Snapshot is run on the count date for the current year.
• Update the OnSIS Reporting Dates to reflect the upcoming OnSIS count date for the current school year.  
• Run the Demographic Snapshot for your schools.
• Return the OnSIS Reporting Dates to reflect last school year's dates that you are currently reporting to OnSIS.
• Note: users should not run the OnSIS submission reports while these reporting dates are temporarily adjusted.

• Ensure that any new courses have the alternate course number populated with the appropriate Ministry course or subject code (e.g., ENG1D for secondary schools, LAN-10 for elementary schools).
• Ensure all students have been assigned an OEN:
  • Users can run the New OEN Request and OEN Validation Request reports (found under Provincial Reports) to request OENs for new students and validate OENs for existing students. 
  • Under Special Functions->Import Ontario Data Files, use the New OEN Import report to Import OEN values provided by the Ministry into PowerSchool.
  • Under Special Functions->Import Ontario Data Files, use the OEN Validation Import report to view the errors and results of the import.
    • The import creates an HTML results page listing the results of the validation for the students included in the OEN Validation Request file and shows any errors that were encountered by the Ministry when processing the request file.
• For the June Secondary submission, ensure that the recent OSSLT results have been incorporated into the student data. 
  • This information can be uploaded from the EQAO OSSLT student result file using PowerSchool's Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) Outcomes Import found under the menu option Special Functions->Import Ontario Data Files. 
  • This import adds the outcomes to the StudentTestScores table for the corresponding English (OSSLT-E) or French (OSSLT-F) OSSLT tests. 
• Review the educator assignment records for each educator being reported to OnSIS (under Ontario Provincial Information on the Staff page). Make sure that the Class Assignment flag is selected for all teachers that are assigned classes.
  
  

OnSIS Reporting Prerequisite Steps for Each Reporting Cycle

• Download the Pending Area Extract (PAE) files from the OnSIS Site. You can consult with OnSIS on how you can download these files.
• Import the PAE files into PowerSchool using OnSIS Pending Area Extract Import report (Found under Special Functions/Import Ontario Data Files).
  • K-12 schools (who are setup in PowerSchool as 2 schools elementary and secondary) need to make sure that the District setup > Enable PAE Import School Parameter is selected. This flag controls whether the PAE import process displays a parameter allowing users to specify the school with which imported PAE records are associated. This flag should be selected only for schools with students in both elementary and secondary grade levels that have a single ministry BSID number (for example, a school that contains grades 5 - 12), but is set up in PowerSchool as two separate schools for the purposes of scheduling, reporting..etc.
• Run OnSIS Demographic Snapshot (found under Provincial Reports) on the count dates.  

  • This report runs a process that stores the values of certain student demographic fields as of the OnSIS submission count dates entered on the District Setup.

  • It's very important that this process be run on the count date, to ensure that the student's current values for several fields as of that date.  
  • There is an option to schedule this report to run on the count date, which is highly recommended.

  • Values for the following fields are stored in the ON_OnSIS_Snapshot table:

    • Grade Level
    • Province Of Entry
    • Country Of Entry
    • Entry Language
    • Postal Code
    • Board Residence Status
    • Residence Status
    • OYAP Flag
    • Independent Study Flag
    • Country (Current Residence)
    • Province (Current Residence)
    • Gender and Gender Identity (this field is only populated when Gender is 'Prefer to Specify (S)')
• Run OnSIS Create Class Codes Report (found under Provincial Reports).
  • This report generates and stores class codes for all classes in the master schedule, not just for combined classes.  Only sections that do not have a class code are reported and updated.
  • This is the class code value that will be reported to OnSIS.
• Data Validation Report
  • Data Validation enables you to run a process to validate data against OnSIS business rules for a specific submission period.
  • The output of this process appears on the Start Page > Validation Errors Viewer > Data Views page as a list of students with data issues for that submission period, along with error messages that indicate the nature of those issues and the error severity. 
  • Run the General Validations option several times before every count date to correct your data before running the OnSIS file.
  • Closer to the OnSIS count date, start running the report for specific submission period (October, March, or June). 
  • Use the Validation Errors Viewer page to view the students with errors.
  • Fix the errors, run the data validation report again to refresh the Errors Viewer. Repeat this process as needed.

OnSIS Submission Reports

1. Run OnSIS School submission report ( Elementary, secondary, Summary, Night, or CTCC)
2. On the report run page there is an option to Validate XML, use this option to validate the generated file against OnSIS Rules. 
3. An XML file is generated and  you can use the Validation Errors Viewer page to view the students with errors. Fix the errors and re-run the OnSIS file.
4. Review the file to make sure that the expected segments are generated.
5. Re-run the report with the Save XML option, this option saves the segments generated in the file into tables. These tables are used to generate OnSIS Verification Reports, also you can use them for your own queries. 
   1. It is expected to use this option when the ONSIS XML file is validated, errors are corrected and ready to be submitted to the Ministry.
6. After the report is generated, you can start running the different verification sections reports ex: Section C1: Enrolment by Attendance Type, Section D: Enrolment by Age and gender...). verify the data and make the appropriate changes. Repeat step 5 and 6 as needed until the file is ready to be uploaded on the Ministry Site.