Why do some settings appear to be missing?
The BrightArrow Settings page has a lot of settings that help control what you want the system to do. You can turn on/off options and change how some options work. From District Office there are some options that appear that won't appear from the schools. When you have the Admin option enabled at district the minimum settings appear.
As you enable other features the options that pertain to those features appear as well
So the question is, what makes some options show and not others?
BrightArrow Search Section Display
This option refers to how the courses are displayed for teachers. It does not apply when "Teacher Portal" is set to "Disabled". Since it's not needed if it's disabled it hides itself when the setting in the district row is set to "Disabled".
Note: This setting does not affect the exports out of Data Export Manager in any way. It only affects how things react in the teacher search page that comes with our plugin.
List Name for Final Grade Searches
If you allow teachers to search the gradebook by final grade (traditional grade) and send messages based on criteria they enter then this option shows. It allows you to default a list name that each teacher would use for sending these special current selection lists. With the list name the same the data loads into the same list each time the teacher runs it making it possible for them to create a message once and feed new data each week without having to redo that work. When the "Teacher Portal" option is on that turns on the basic teacher features for staff who have BrightArrow enabled for them. If you wish to use this extra feature the "Final Grade" option must also be enabled. If that option is disabled in the district row this setting is hidden as it's not needed.
Note: This setting does not affect the exports out of Data Export Manager in any way. It only affects how things react in the teacher search page that comes with our plugin.
List Name for Missing Assignment Searches
Similar to List Name for Final Grade Searches it refers to the list name to feed data into when a teacher search for missing assignments is used. Again, so that the message doesn’t need to be rewritten each time the teacher does a different search. Both the "Teacher Portal" and the additional "Missing Assignment" option have to be enabled to show. When "Missing Assignment" is disabled the option is not necessary so it is hidden to reduce clutter.
Note: This setting does not affect the exports out of Data Export Manager in any way. It only affects how things react in the teacher search page that comes with our plugin.
Preserve guardian changes for current selections when using
This option was introduced when the option to send to just students vs parents was added. When that was added schools with parent portals would run current selections for students but see parent phone/emails. The option was a way to say if your BrightArrow parent portal page used parent data, student data, or parent & student data. In some instances schools wanted to always send live data and not connect to the parent portal data. Because this only mattered to schools with parent portals created for them it only shows when that portal is enabled.
Over time this option became less specific to users with parent portals and can likely be adjusted in a future update to always show, even if the portal option is disabled. In the meantime if you wish to adjust this but do not wish to enable it you can set the guardian portal option to "Admin Only" which will not show it in the guardian portal but will show it in the admin. You only need to set it in the District row, you can even leave it off at the school row. After making your change you can set it back to disabled or leave it as admin only in district office, it'll save the value you set either way.
** If you set it to something like Parents & Students but your portal list is the All Parents (sync) list then it will link back to data that does not contain student phone/emails. Even though PowerSchool will still be sending accurate information the list will only show what matched. Similarly if your portal list is Parents and Students but your setting is parents only then when you run a parents current selection it'll match on the parents and students list and thus bring in the student phone/emails as well.