Important Note: If your district uses the North Carolina state-based PowerSchool setup, you cannot use the PowerSchool Auto Sync. However, Clever is integrated with NCEdCloud.
This article covers the following:
- PowerSchool Auto Sync Functionality
- Customization
- School Year Rollover
- Troubleshooting Missing Teacher Records
- Permissions
PowerSchool Auto Sync Functionality
✓ Runs every two hours, by exporting via Direct Database Export (DDE)
✓ Syncs all students with an active enrollment status ("enroll_status" = 0)
✓ Student email addresses are not synced by default, but they can be brought in through the steps listed below under Customization
✓ Syncs all staff members from the Staff table, who are assigned to an active School and have an active staff status ("Status" = 1)
X Cannot sync the Central Office (school_id = 0), or any staff assigned to this site
X Cannot sync co-teachers at this time
Customization
PowerSchool syncs can be customized to sync nightly, instead of every two hours.
Clever can filter exports from PowerSchool to limit the schools, teachers, or students included in the sync. Reach out to Clever Support if you would like to filter exports.
For information on de-duplicating teacher records from PowerSchool, see this article.
To sync student emails from the default "Student Email" page in PowerSchool, follow these steps:
- Navigate to page-level permissions in PowerSchool: Start Page > System Administrator > Security > Access to Page Permissions (/admin/security/changepageaccesspriv.html)
- Navigate to quick exports: Start > System > Page and Data Management > Quick Export (admin/importexport/exportstudents.html)
- Click on modify access privileges for this page
- Set permissions for the appropriate security group to 'Full' (the security group should be the group assigned to the PowerSchool user you've shared with Clever). Submit changes
- Turn off page level permissions. Navigate to: Start Page > System Administrator > Security > Access to Page Permissions (/admin/security/changepageaccesspriv.html)
To request additional customization and filtering for your PowerSchool sync, request assistance from Clever Support.
School Year Rollover
On August 1st, Clever will begin syncing all enrollments with an end date after August 1st, 2016 (“DateLeft” > 8/1/2017). If you would like to begin syncing enrollments for the 2017-18 School Year before August, please request assistance from Clever Support.
Troubleshooting Missing Teacher Records
There may be users such as administrators, secretaries, and para-professionals who might not use PowerSchool directly, but need access to applications through Clever. If those users are missing from your Clever data, please ensure that those users are tied to a specific school site within PowerSchool. Teaching staff who are associated with the district office, but not a specific school, will not be included in the PowerSchool auto sync.
If you have any additional questions please feel free to open a support request and our team will be glad to help!
Permissions
Clever requires specific permissions in order to facilitate an automatic sync with your SIS. Clever is a read-only service, and requires the following permissions to integrate with PowerSchool. Please see the attached document for best practices.
In addition to these permissions, we recommend the following best practices:
- Create an individual SIS account only for Clever -- no one else should log in with the same credentials; and
- Limit Clever's SIS account to read-only access.
Note: Clever also offers an alternative method of sharing PowerSchool rosters with Clever (via SFTP) – please contact us if you’d like to explore this option for your district.
Comments
4 comments
I would suggest describing in this article how and when sections hare included in the sync process.
Also a listing of all fields that are included in the sync would be helpful.
PowerSchool has posted notices that districts should not allow third parties to export data with the DDE.
I wish Clever would put together a PowerSchool plugin (the officially supported way to export data to a third party).
@Dave, I does look like they are making some changes to these areas, including making the mappings much more visible to us, through Sync | Settings | Customize field mappings, better described here:
https://support.clever.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003630803-How-do-I-customize-my-auto-sync-
which led me here:
https://schools.clever.com/sync/settings/mappings
I didn't do a thorough check, but at a glance, all my fields are there, including custom ones.
@Steven, I've wondered why they don't go in the API direction. I have no experience with API or PS plugins, so I can't speak to which is a better use of development time, but DDE does seem pretty limited.
@Clever, This article states the "Syncs all staff members from the Staff table, who are assigned to an active School and have an active staff status ("Status" = 1)", what is the point of syncing more than teachers? I think this statement is incorrect, and it should say, "Syncs all teachers from the Teachers view,...". I further believe rather than using your 2 DDE constraints to only pull status=1 and schoolid > 0, you should instead consider pulling status=1 and staffstatus = 1 (teachers). Current teachers will be assigned a school, not district, and this tidy's up quite a bit of extra people that come in as Teachers with no sections (Staff?). If principals and other admin folk could be accurately brought in via Teachers view, it would be fabulous, but I have not found that to be possible.
Thanks all for your comments! Clever is committed to integrating with Powerschool's API but has not yet received approval from Powerschool to do so. We recommend reaching out to your Powerschool rep to express your interest in connecting to Clever via the Powerschool API.
Steven - I’m interested in discussing the PowerSchool Plugin option you mentioned. I will reach out directly to setup a time to connect.
Bryan - we don’t limit the records that we pull to teachers only (i.e., staffstatus = 1) in order to ensure that our parameters are broad enough to accommodate a variety of districts with distinct staff classifications. Our support team is happy to customize these filters for districts on a case-by-case basis. If you’re interested in customizing your filters, feel free to open a support ticket here.
As for principals and other administrators who are not associated with sections - we recommend uploading these users as School Admins. You can read more about School Admins and how to add them to Clever here.
Sam Atkeson
SIS Partnerships Manager
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