Rostering with PowerSchool

Formative allows Gold plan districts to roster their teachers, students, and classes from PowerSchool SIS by uploading the data in CSV files via SFTP.

First you will want to request SFTP credentials from us to upload the files to. Then configure those SFTP credentials as an SFTP connection in PowerSchool.

You will want to visit the Import & Export area of PowerSchool SIS and create a number of export templates and schedule them to run each evening. You create a template using the "Export" tab, by doing an export and saving its settings as a template.

For each template, you will want to choose the appropriate data source and columns as listed below.

Note that when you select a column to be included, PowerSchool will output a column prefixed with the name of the data source. For example, when you select ID in the CC data, it will output a column CC.ID by default. This is not a problem, you can leave that extra prefix on the output column names. The column ID is required for all tables, except `Student_Email_export.csv`.

Source: CC
Filename: CC_export.csv
Columns:
ID
SchoolID
SectionID
StudentID
Section_Number
TeacherID
TermID
Course_Number
DateEnrolled
DateLeft
Source: Courses
Filename: Courses_export.csv
Columns:
ID
Course_Name
Course_Number
SchoolID
Source: Schools
Filename: Schools_export.csv
Columns:
ID
Name
School_Number
Source: Sections
Filename: Sections_export.csv
Columns:
ID
Course_Number
Grade_Level
SchoolID
Section_Number
TermID
Source: SectionTeacher
Filename: SectionTeacher_export.csv
Columns:
ID
TeacherID
START_DATE
SECTIONID
ROLEID
END_DATE
Source: Students
Filename: Students_export.csv
Filter: Active (Enroll_Status = 0)
Columns:
ID
First_Name
Last_Name
SchoolID
Student_Number
Enroll_Status
Email_Addr (If your PowerSchool setup uses a different field name for email, change it to use Email_Addr as the output column name. You can also include the Student_Email_export.csv table which includes emails, see below for more information.)
Source: Teachers
Filename: Teachers_export.csv
Filter: Active (Status = 1)
Columns:
ID
First_Name
Last_Name
SchoolID
Status
Email_Addr
Source: Student Email (optional if Students_export.csv has an email field)
Filename: Student_Email_export.csv
Columns:
Email
Student_Number

On the filtering step, you may want to add a filter so that it only includes teachers and students that are currently active, and if you are not rostering all students & teachers at all schools you may want to add filters so that only the desired teachers and students are included. Use the provided button in the second to preview what data will be included and adjust your columns and filters as needed.

On the export settings step:

set the filename to end with .csv instead of .txt, so the filename for Teachers would be Teachers_export.csv
set the line endings to LF
set the file encoding to UTF-8
leave the header row enabled
specify field values should be wrapped in double quotes
set the field separate to Comma (instead of Tab)

Once you have created a template, you can visit the saved templates tab and click the calendar button next to that template to schedule it, specifying the SFTP connection you created before as the destination, and a time in the evening (8 PM, for example) to run the job on weekdays.

Note that if you are only interested in rostering Teachers, perhaps because you are using Google Classroom to roster classes, you only need to upload the Schools and Teachers data.

Sync rosters with your Student Information System (SIS) using OneRoster

Setting up classes and adding students