Tonight's Home Base Maintenance Window Extended

Tonight's Home Base Maintenance is set to begin at 6 p.m.  Currently, PowerSchool is the only Home Base application that will undergo maintenance.  All other Home Base applications will remain available.  

The PowerSchool application will be brought down at approximately 6 p.m. tonight and returned to service by 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, May 21.  Maintenance is being extended due to a PowerSchool upgrade to 20.11.4.3 and standard security patching.  The application will be made accessible to all users once maintenance is complete.  

Please share this message with other staff within your PSU.  If you have questions pertaining to maintenance, contact the Home Base Team at home_base@dpi.nc.gov. 

Note:  Each year, a list of scheduled maintenance windows are published by NCDPI.  This is published in advance to help teachers and administrators better prepare for temporary outages and loss of access.  Please review the 2022-2023 maintenance schedule and put these dates on your calendar. In most cases, the entire window is not necessary and we can return systems to service earlier than listed. If emergency maintenance is required in addition to these scheduled dates, all users will be notified in advance.

The Home Base Opt-in Process is Open!

The NC Department of Public Instruction is pleased to announce that the Home Base Opt-in Process is open. Finance officers and charter school directors/principals were notified earlier this week that they may begin opting into Home Base for their PSU.  Click on the following link to see the full announcement and share with the appropriate staff:  hb_pricing_memo_2022-23. 

Note:  Only finance officers and charter directors/principals should opt in for their PSU.

Please visit the NCDPI Home Base Opt-in Website for detailed information concerning the Home Base Opt-in Process.  Questions may be directed to home_base@dpi.nc.gov or yolanda_wilson@dpi.nc.gov.

Cross-LEA Enrollment Pilot Participation

The Home Base SIS team is seeking PSUs willing to participate in a PowerSchool Cross-LEA Pilot. The Cross-LEA function will involve enrolling students from one PSU into courses at another PSU within PowerSchool and will not include NCVPS.  The projected target date for the pilot is the first semester of the 2022-2023 school year.

A functional demonstration of the product will occur before volunteers for the program make their final commitment.  The PSUs who choose to continue will be expected to:

• Actively participate in the pilot program
• Submit support tickets to report issues
• Participate in product training
• Attend 30 minutes to 1-hour online monitoring sessions of the pilot program weekly to discuss the positive and or negative aspects of the product and its usage.

Note: The frequency of the meetings will be expected to decrease as those piloting the product become more adept with their use of the product.

Please reach out to Russell Dixon via email if you are interested in being part of the PowerSchool Cross-LEA Pilot.

New: NC PSU Staff Self-Paced PD Courses One Pager

For any NC PSU Staff who need CEU credits, DTL now has a database of all current asynchronous NCEES PD opportunities for staff. Find the PD that you need: NC PSU Staff Self-Paced PD Courses.

The listing includes free DPI courses published in NCEES and a resource for retired or on-leave staff currently not active in NCEES.
 

Looking for DLCs? Courses are also sorted by credit type.

Note: The acquiring of CEUs and contact hours is subject to LEA/Charter approval. Staff should follow local guidelines on pre-approvals, completed course approvals or requests to apply for approval of a different credit type on completed PD.

Reminder:  OCR/CRDC - Action Required - Section 504 Designation in PowerSchool by June 29

The Office of Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) is a mandatory federal report covering a wide variety of previous year data, including counts based on students with a Section 504 designation.

The CRDC SY2021-22 collection will begin in SY2022-23.  It is important to record the Section 504 designation in PowerSchool before EOY. 

How a Section 504 designation is documented and monitored is a local level decision, however; in order for the PowerSchool CRDC Preview report to calculate Section 504 survey questions, there must be Special Program record '504' associated to the student.  There is a quick reference document located at https://www.dpi.nc.gov/documents/student_info/ps-qrd-recording-section-504-in-powerschool-20141009.

If no data exist in PowerSchool regarding Section 504 status for students, PSUs will be required to update CRDC survey questions after NCDPI uploads data on behalf of the state. PSUs who wish to avoid the burdensome manual updates to the CRDC should ensure that all 504 students have been identified in PowerSchool no later than June 29.

Reminder:  Implementing a Weekly Auto-run Process of the State Discipline Report in PowerSchool

Per SBE policy (SSCH-000), incidents of certain behaviors and disciplinary actions must be submitted to the state within 5 business days of occurrence (see pages 4 - 6 in the North Carolina Discipline Data Reporting Procedures Manual). To meet this requirement, the data must reside in the state database where it can be viewed in state reports.  Currently, for this to occur, the State Discipline Report must be run manually in PowerSchool at the school level.  Over the last few months, we have been working with PowerSchool to create an auto-run process which will automatically run the report every week. 

It should be noted that while the report will be auto-run weekly:

• Schools and PSUs will still be able to manually run the report.
• Schools will need to manually verify if the State Discipline Report ran successfully.
• Schools will need check for any data exceptions or errors thrown when the State Discipline Report ran.
• Schools and PSUs will still need to manually approve the State Discipline Report in PowerSchool during the collection window that runs June 1 through EOY of each year.
• Discipline data may be deleted, updated, changed, and modified throughout the school year by schools and PSUs and is not considered final until EOY of each year when the report is approved in PowerSchool by schools and PSUs.

Our goal is to implement the auto-run process beginning July 1, 2022.  The proposed day and time for the auto-run process is 3:00 a.m. Saturdays starting July 1 and running through EOY each year. 

Please provide feedback on the proposed time and day using this survey link.  The survey will close on May 27 at 6:00 p.m. 

Reminder: PowerSchool Years and Terms at the LEA Office

At the LEA Office level in PowerSchool, the Years and Terms start and end dates MUST encompass the start date of the PSU’s earliest starting school and the end date of the PSU’s latest ending school. This also includes all Program Schools. The start date for Years and Terms at the LEA level should be 7/1 and the end date should be 6/30.

This information has been updated in the PS User Guide: End-of-Year Processing and can be found under Creating Years and Terms in the user guide.

Reminder:  Attendance During Exam Week(s)

To be considered in attendance, a student (except for hospital/homebound or staggered kindergarten) must be present in the school for the school day or at a place other than the school with the approval of the appropriate school official for the purpose of attending an authorized school activity. Such activities may include field trips, athletic contests, student conventions, musical festivals, or any similar approved activity.

Except as noted above, a student must be present at least one-half of the school's instructional day in order to be recorded present for that day.

NC General Statute 115C-378 states in part that no person shall encourage, entice, or counsel any child of compulsory school age to be unlawfully absent from school.

If a student is exempted from an exam and is not present in the school for the school day or not at a place other than the school with the approval of the appropriate school official for the purpose of attending an authorized school activity, the student is absent.

For questions or concerns, contact Student Accounting at studentaccounting@dpi.nc.gov.

New Home Base Admin Course 

Feedback from PSUs identified a need for resource hubs for the Home Base products. The product managers have created Admin Resource Courses for each area. These resource courses are located in the NCDPI Canvas instance.

Please visit these courses.  Below are the steps to enroll in these courses:

How to access these resources:

• Sign in to the Blue Canvas icon within NCEdCloud
• Using the Global Navigation (on the left), click the Home Base Resources button
• On the menu that opens, select the course(s) you would like to enroll into
• After enrolling, the course will appear on your Canvas Dashboard

Other Information:

• Feel free to provide feedback on these courses. They all contain a feedback button on their homepage.
• We will continue to update these courses as more product information becomes available

Access to NCDPI Canvas for Home Base Resource Hubs

Any PSU PowerSchool SIS admin who does not have access to the NCDPI “Blue” Canvas located in the NCEdCloud portal and would like to have access or grant access to data managers within their PSU, please complete the form below.  In this form, you can enter up to 5 accounts manually or upload a CSV/Excel file if you have more than 5 account requests.

 If you have any questions, please get in touch with Corey McNeill.  

Link to Form

June Canvas Statewide Call

As a reminder, please be sure to register for our upcoming statewide call on Monday, June 6, 2022, at 2 PM. Use THIS registration link to sign up for the webinar.

We hope to see you there!

InstructureCon 2022

Canvas has announced that InstructureCon 2022 will be an online and FREE event again this year. The one day conference will be held on Thursday, July 14, 2022.

Check out this page to learn more and sign up to receive updates for registration.

Transcend Webinar Recording

In case you missed the informational webinars for Transcend, the recording is now available on the NCDPI YouTube Channel.

Transcend is a computer-adaptive interim assessment add-on for Schoolnet that is available as part of the Home Base opt-in process for the 2022-2023 school year. Transcend provides tests for grades 3-8 ELA and Math and is priced at $4 per 3rd-8th grade ADM. 

If you have any questions about Transcend or would like to learn more prior to the Home Base opt-in period, please contact john.mairs@dpi.nc.gov or jeffrey.hauger@pearson.com.

Follow Us on Social Media!

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and begin receiving "Did You Know" tips featuring each Home Base product. 

These messages will include upcoming changes, tips, and even hidden treasures within each product to make your job easier.  If you are not following us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, click on the links below and begin today!  Make sure you share this information with other staff within your school.

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