With growing restrictions around COVID-19, and with Ontario students already being affected by school closures, we know this is a time of great uncertainty for all of us and our communities. The PowerSchool team is monitoring the situation closely and is keeping the health and safety of our customers and employees a top priority while working to ensure every student continues to get access to the education they deserve.
With that in mind, here are some useful resources to help you get the most out of PowerSchool Trillium and minimize disruptions to education.
Attendance
The attendance G Day code should be recorded for the days of school closure, currently scheduled until May 4th. This includes the period of time when schools are offering online learning sessions. For reference, check out these online help articles:
For continuing education classes, schools should follow the Continuing Education Register Instructions, where an instructional session has been cancelled due to exceptional circumstances and the teacher/instructor is paid, the cancelled session will be recognized for funding purposes and should be marked with a ‘C’ on the register. The reason for the cancellation must be also be recorded
Teacher contact sessions for the independent study or correspondence/self study classes can be done virtually or via telephone.
Mid Term Marks
Some schools may be entering marks during April, especially for Grade 12 students. If marks are only being entered for some of the students or courses in the report period, and the report period is identified as the final report period for a course, ensure that the 'Process Blank Marks' preference on the School Academic tab is unchecked. This will ensure that students with no marks entered for these courses will not have a final mark of 0 (zero) assigned.
Diploma Requirements
The Ministry has indicated that no student will be prevented from graduating as a result of the school closure. Lack of Community Involvement hours and completion of the Literacy requirement for the diploma are the two top items for addressing. We have held discussions with the Ministry regarding these items and given our suggestions on how to record this in the SIS. We're awaiting the Ministry's final decision on how these items should appear on the transcript (while limiting impacts to OCAS/OUAC reporting), and what (if any) additional information needs to be reported to OnSIS in June.
Boards may find the Potential Graduates Report useful to help track students requiring adjustments in order to graduate. Check out the Potential Graduates Report article for more details.
SHSM Requirements
The Ministry has indicated that students will be able to earn their SHSM award even if they have not completed all of the requirements, including certifications and courses. We will release a new version of TwebSchAdmin (5.42.30) and Core Trillium (4.13.10) that will allow a user with the new security task 'Override SHSM Earned Date Calculation' to enter the earned date and granted by school number for an SHSM that has not yet been earned.
There will be some constraints. The first is that the student must have earned their OSSD 1999, so you will need to use the 'Award OSSD Separately' field on the Award/Credits page to allow Trillium to award the OSSD diploma without the SHSM having been completed. Trillium will also ensure that you enter both an earned date and granted by information for the SHSM; entering only one field will not be accepted.
In the past, Trillium has provided scripts to enable courses to count towards SHSM requirement areas that could not be accomplished through Transcript Information. While this will still be an option, Boards may also choose to use this new override capability to grant the SHSM without the course.
The Ministry's Student Success branch has provided a Q&A document on SHSM questions. A copy of the document is available in this article.
We will post updates in this article as we receive feedback from the Ministry.