Good morning,
I am a rookie PowerSchool user as a school administrator. As a teacher from 2006-2016 I was PowerSchool user with PowerSchool Admin access the last few years as a teacher. When I became an administrator, my district used Skyward. I used Skyward from 2016-2021 as a middle school assistant principal and 2021-2023 as a high school principal. I have since switched roles and now serve as a high school assistant principal in a district using PowerSchool. One of my primary roles is behavior management. Recently, we have had district level discussions in K-12 in regard to equity and student discipline. To put it simply, our data is a complete mess. I am in a much larger district with much greater resources than the small district where I served as an assistant principal in middle school and as high school principal. Our process for reporting behavioral matters and subsequent steps in the process was very streamlined in Skyward that was completely automated. For example;
1. A teacher would create a referral in the system, select a behavior type (this was limited to the assigned codes from our DOE data exchange, they could not enter their own behavior type), write up a narrative, and submit.
2. Upon submission, a dialog box appear asking the teacher if this is a "classroom referral". If they selected "Yes" the referral was for documentation purposes only. If the teacher answered "No", administrators where automatically notified via email an office referral was entered for administrative response.
3. Once I received notification via email, I could log into Skyward and review the matter. From there, I would speak with the student and determine a course of action. The referral would then be changed to an offense and the course of action would be selected (Parent Call/Email, Detention, ISS, OSS, OSS pend EXP, restitution, counseling, etc., etc. based on our MTSS). This was done in a drop down titled "Action" where all responses I listed above where available and one of them was selected.
4. In the event an action was assigned, Skyward would automatically populate a pre-formatted .pdf discipline letter with all the information needed for the event and send an email with the same information with a .pdf attached. School information was in the header, Skyward automatically pulled the principals or assistant principals contact (name, phone/ext, and email) information and placed it in the .pdf. Additionally, it pulled and populated the .pdf with the following;
Teacher Referral Time/Date
Teacher Referal Narrative
Behavior Type
Administrative Response Type
Administrative Action Type (MTSS type, Detention, ISS, OSS, OSS pend Exp., etc.)
Administrative Action Date (Detention Date, Detention Start/End Time, ISS Date, ISS Duration (Range or Class Period, OSS Duration Date Range, etc.)
At my new district we are very much interested in creating the same type of process in PowerSchool district wide. Primarily because they way our disctrict PowerSchool administrators have our system set, it allows far too much ambiguity and text data entry, rather than drop downs/radio button selectors for the discipline reporting process. Additionally, many hands have to touch our current process including secretaries where errors are being made. Our main focus is to clean up the process so we have less to fix when it comes to state reporting at the end of the year. Additionally, we would like to automate our teacher/parent/admin reporting with auto generated pdfs and emails.
Is this possible with PowerSchool? Skyward's user interface was a bit of a bear and it seemed from a design standpoint they added what was needed at requests of users, although sometimes the process was a bit cumbersome. However, I would venture to guess PowerSchool is just as feature rich and our district level administrators have not setup that process or they are in need of assistance in doing so. Thanks in advance for any and all help!
