Across the country, schools are working to determine how best to continue to meet the needs of our special population students. For PowerSchool Special Programs (PSSP) users, there are a number of features in the system that may be of help to you during this difficult time. We’ve also compiled some additional resources that may be useful as schools work through managing remote meetings, signatures, and other Special Programs needs.
General Resources
- ZOOM – Zoom has lifted the 40 minute free basic account limitation! Excellent tool to meet with parent/guardians, share your desktop, record the meeting and send recording to the entire team.
- Recent Hacking Incident, link to best practices document.
- Slack – An excellent tool that PowerSchool uses to collaborate!
- Adobe Acrobat Pro with e-sign. Allows parents to sign electronically, then email back so you can attach to the student record, without parents having to print it out the forms.
- 5 Tips for Staying Productive and Mentally Healthy Working from Home
- 10 Smart Quotes about Working from Home
- Working from Home – Guide for Leaders
- PowerSchool Community – Find the latest product information such as release notifications, advisory board information, knowledge based articles and customer forums. (see attachment)
PowerSchool Special Programs Features you can use today
- Sending Communications – The ability to send messages to other users with in the PSSP application.
- Caseloads – Updating caseloads might be useful due to staff absences.
- Revising IEP forms – a refresher on how to revise an IEP.
- Reviewing and Acknowledging Document – Version 19.11 or later allows the users to review and acknowledge a student form.
- Special Programs Document Delivery Profile – the ability to log documentation sent to parent/guardians. Profile stores the type of document, date of delivery, mode of delivery.
- Creating PDF’s with or without Password Protection – With the documentation used for Special Programs containing personal identifiable information, Special Programs has a way to protect PDF’s from being modified after creation.
- File-Based Documents - There may be situations where documents related to a student arrive in the form of a file such as a word processing document, a PDF (Portable Document File), or a multi-page TIFF document that is commonly provided by image scanning software. PowerSchool Special Programs allows you to upload these files into the list of documents and make them available online. Multiple files can be uploaded for one file-based document.
- PowerSchool SIS - Enabling Student and Parent Logins
- DocuSign – many of our state models now offer DocuSign capabilities in the Special Education forms. There is no cost to implement DocuSign in PSSP, however, there is a cost from DocuSign. See attachment for more information.
Please be reminded to visit our COVID-19 Forum area also. There are many articles being posted almost daily from various districts/states with additional information/resources.
If you should have any questions regarding the features of PSSP, please log a support ticket via specialeducationsupport@powerschool.com. Our Support team is working hard to ensure we all get through this together!
The entire PowerSchool team sends our well wishes to you, your colleagues and families.
