PowerSchool SIS

What do you like best?

Everything is web-based! admin/teacher/student-parent portal. They have great integration with State/Provincial reporting. Awesome User Groups meetings. I'm a hosted client the response is. They have outstanding support and other products added to PS SIS, like enrollment and unified classroom. They also have good approved vendors for other needs like notifications to parents and alerts.

Our district has been using PS SIS for the last 9 years, always as a hosted instance. No downtime issues in all these years, nor loss of data.

Training for admins is amazing. Teachers with really little training can confidently use PowerTeacher Pro. PowerSchool SIS has been an excellent tool overall. New features are being pushed regularly, making it better and more responsive to the province's changes and requirements and our stakeholders (students and parents).

The layout and navigation are clean and user-friendly.

Parent Portal is easy to navigate, and the new contacts unlimited is a great feature and will be amazing when it is all rollover in the system when PS will remove the legacy fields. The Parent Portal can be customized as well. We added an online payment option that helps lots to solve some fees and tuition payment issues.

When our organization implemented PS, they assigned a representative to work with us to set up the system and provide us with all the needed contacts to succeed. We bought a 3-day intensive in-person training for our school admins and trained a district-wide employee to maintain the system and keep up to date with internal training.

What do you dislike?

Customization is not that easy to do. Pages like demographics and medical information should be easier to manipulate and customize without making costume fields; just re-arranging or hide some fields will be really good.

One more thing I with they have integrated is Google classroom.

Custom report cards should also be easier to solve. It's a little cumbersome, and many districts are deciding to go with third parties to solve the issue.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Go for it! The company is excellent and reliable. Great product

Be sure you have a full-time employee to manage the implementation, integration, and ongoing administration.

Stay on top of the new releases and train your admin for customizations.

Be sure to join PS User Groups in your area.

Train your teachers and use a teacher to train them afterwards. A good piece of advice will be to train parents as well to use the portal. Lots of communication can be done via the parent portal.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Provincial Reporting is a must for our system, and this solves the issues very well.

Teachers Gradebook and keeping track of assignments

Attendance records and Student documents to submit to the government.