Settings Page: School Settings

From an individual school within PowerSchool the settings page will only show that school’s specific settings. If a setting has been globally disabled at district it will not be available to change at the school level. However if a setting is enabled at the district level a school can choose to enable or disable that feature for themselves.

1. Admin Functions: Show the system in this school. Disabling this setting disables all settings for this school.
2. Settings: Click here to see the roster settings
3. BrightChat: Show/Hide the BrightChat specific pages
   1. Enabling when you haven’t purchased BrightChat will not enable the BrightChat functionality, it will only reveal the BrightChat PowerSchool pages.
4. Staff Contacts: Show, hide, edit staff contacts. 5 options:
   1. Disabled
   2. Admin Edit Only - Shows the page from the staff record only
   3. View My Contacts - Same as Admin Edit Only + allow every user to see their own contacts (but not edit) from the Personalize menu
   4. Edit My Custom Contacts - Same as View My Contacts except users can edit the custom fields in the personalize menu, stock fields such as home_phone, school_phone are still uneditable.
   5. Edit My Contacts - Same as View My Contacts except all fields are editable including stock fields while in PowerSchool. PowerTeacher will not allow editing of stock fields so those are read only from PT.
5. Report Emailing: This is the setting referred to here
6. Teacher Portal: Enable basic features in PowerTeacher and PowerTeacher Pro. Basic features are searching for students in a section, in all sections to send messages.
7. Teacher Portal - Final Grade: Allow teachers to search the gradebook for students whose percent range matches criteria and send them a message.
8. Teacher Portal - Missing Assignments: Allow teachers to search the gradebook for students with missing assignments.
9. Teacher Portal - My Lists: Add the My Lists link to PowerTeacher & PowerTeacher Pro
10. Teacher Portal - Guardian Portal: Show the parent portal page within the backpack and PowerTeacher Pro. Useful if parents contact teachers instead of the school with questions.
11. Teacher Portal - Report Emailing: Allow teachers to email out object reports that have been shared with them. Setup is on a teacher by teacher basis so may be easier to run them only from the admin portal.
12. Guardian Portal: Show the page the parents see. Parent pages show past messages sent to them. 3 options
    1. Disabled - Does not show in Public portal or Admin portal
    2. Admin Only - Does not show in Public portal, will show in admin portal within a student record. This is good for viewing what parents would see before giving it to them. The admin page is identical to the parent page as it mimics logging in as that parent.
    3. Enabled - Display parent page in Admin and Public portals.
13. Permission by Person: With this enabled the interface will only show up in PowerSchool for users who are enabled in the individual settings area. With this disabled the system shows for everyone. If we are auto-creating your users for you then this is recommended to be enabled so you can control who does/not send messages.

Roster Settings

The “Roster Settings” tab can also be edited at a school level. Those settings may be set to use whatever the district settings are, set to use another school’s settings, or may be individual to that specific school. At the top of the filters slide in the “Use Settings from” option will show 3 options:

1. Use District Settings: Whatever is set at district will be used for this school as well
2. Do not link: This school will use it’s own settings. If district settings change they will not affect this school.
3. Use [other school abbreviation] Settings: If another school has individualized their settings you may link to them so you only need to change it once for all linked schools.

1. Change the Use Settings From option to accurately reflect the school’s needs
2. Roster settings control how many days before an enrollment date (in the cc table) and how many days after an exit date (in the cc table) the rosters will include a student. In the summer you may wish to increase the number of days before so that teachers have access to students earlier but you may wish to reduce that during the year to minimize messages to students starting in the future. These settings affect the roster export out of DEM as well as section current selections in PowerTeacher
3. Set how far back to look for a missing assignment. Currently this only affects the missing assignments export out of DEM but in the future may also affect the PowerTeacher missing assignments option. The choices are 
   1. by number of days back (you set the number of days)
   2. beginning of the current semester
   3. beginning of the current trimester
   4. beginning of the current quarter
4. Multi-day attendance: Some schools would like to treat tardies as a portion of an absences for purposes of calculating multi-day absence messages. Now you can set how many tardies count for an absence. Setting number of tardies to 5 and number of Absences to convert to to 1 means every 5 tardies counts as 1 absence. You can also use this to create fractions such as every 5 tardies counts as 2 absences which will make every tardy 0.4 absence. The settings here will work with the PowerQueries
   1. BrightArrow Attendance Daily Frequency by Code Category
   2. BrightArrow Attendance Meeting Frequency by Code Category
   3. BrightArrow Attendance Meeting Frequency by Code Category All Sections

What are Roster Settings?

Can a school update contact settings?

The Contact Settings tabs will use district settings regardless of the linkage when the system is set up as a district account. For schools on a shared server each school will have it’s own account and can change their contact settings separately if they wish.