PS Best Practices and Timetable

[tmwldn]

Howdy friends!

I'm still relatively new to the whole PowerSchool and student information systems business. Does anyone have a timetable for how they do things in PowerSchool and when? Like with March coming around, I've gone ahead and created next academic year's year and terms under District Management>Scheduling. I just wanted to know if there was someone out there that has maybe done this enough that they have found the best times of the year to go about these processes, like setting up the next year, end of year processing, summer school stuff, etc.

[ErinR]

Some timelines will differ depending on functions at each district/board. But I'm happy to share a few of ours if that gets you off to a start.

We typically set up our next year years/terms in early December. This allows us to hold some prepare to build/pre-scheduling sessions with key staff in our secondary schools before Christmas break, and fits in with their timelines for school visits etc. (see below)

(When the years/terms are created, it also copies all of your attendance codes to the next year.   If you make adjustments and add any codes after the next year has been created, just make a note to add the new code to the attendance codes for next year as well.)
Schools would build out course catalogs, option entry pages etc. and have these ready for early January.
Secondary school guidance staff start visiting our grade 8 feeder schools early January - February for information/option selection sessions.
Option sheet entry/course selection typically happens early February for all grade 8-12 pupils.

Scheduling/building for our secondary schools typically happens here in an April/May timeframe.

Our elementary schools don't use PowerScheduler for scheduling.

We will typically set up our summer school around April/May so that students can begin to be cross/enrolled for things they plan to take over the summer.

As for end of year, we process both our regular end of year, and summer school end of year around the first two weeks of August, and we process them one right after the other.  We do this because our summer school ends at the end of July, and we have students directly enrolled to the summer school.

If you need to run your summer school year end at a separate time, you can.  You just need to make sure that you don't have any students directly enrolled to it.  All students need to be remote/cross enrolled to the summer school for you to run it separate from your regular year end.

Hope some of that is helpful to you.

[tmwldn]

Thank you so much! This is great info to refer to!