By: David K. Meyers
This application helps LAUSD charter schools using PowerSchool SIS automate that pesky Statistical report you are required to submit to the Charter School Division each month. This task at one time took me as long as two hours to prepare for a single K6 school. If you click the video below, you can see that the same task takes about thirty seconds to perform using the Windows desktop application to perform the same task. This application is available as a MARS Power Toolbox item.
Why:
The LAUSD Statistical Report unfortunately is not a report you can run in a straight forward manner from your Power School SIS. You can almost acquire the required data by running the Power School system report “Attendance Summary by Grade” under the state tab in the attendance section. I use the word “almost” because you must also gather the following data:
Evaluate Reenrollments: The “Attendance Summary by Grade” report will get the attendance days for the reporting period correct for students that have a Reenrollment record in the same period, but it will incorrectly add an additional entry or exit causing your spreadsheet to not balance. You will need to get the month’s reenrollments from DDE and remove the re-entry/exit.
Excused Absences by Grade: You must run the Attendance Count report for the date range and then count each grade level by hand, then subtract the excused from total absences for each grade level group and re-enter into the LAUSD spreadsheet.
Entry/Exit Codes by Grade Level Group and Conversion: The fastest way to get student’s Entry and Exit Codes is to use DDE (or create a reporting engine report), then export to a spreadsheet or database manager. Because your PowerSchool Entry/Exit Codes are likely set to convert to CDE Codes, you will need to convert the code attributions to the LAUSD “E” and “L” codes.
Transpose the data onto the LAUSD Spreadsheet: This is actually where I would make the most mistakes.
Check the Closing and Carried Forward Totals: You’re checking the Carried Forward against the previous month’s closing totals for each grade level group. This basic check is done to insure that LAUSD does not immediately send your report back telling you that you have an error… somewhere.
Doing this entirely manually, it took me about two hours to do a single school/track. Even when I semi-automated the procedure by creating schedule and/or reporting engine reports, and saved database queries to automatically process the base data, it still took me an hour for each school/track.
Of course there is the nightmare you may experience three times each year when your sheets do not balance requiring you to rerun possibly all the spreadsheets you previously submitted for the entire year!
I should mention there are other variations to doing this in PowerSchool such as using the “ADA/ADM by Student” report for the base data. All take about the same amount of time or longer.
Other Features:
The application also provides several other features that will make your life a little faster:
Run Multiple Tracks: The application allows you the option of running and printing the Statistical reports for multiple tracks in the same operation.
Store History and Report Status: At the end of your report generation, the MARS LAUSD Statistical Report tool stores the results where you can manage the status of each month’s report (i.e. “Generated”, “Complete/Signed”, “Sent”, “Revised”).
Automatically Find Errors and Attendance Changes: Each time you generate a Statistical report, the system checks to determine if previous month’s attendance/absent days and Entry/Exits balance. If anomalies are found, the tool can find the month(s) that are the cause of the anomalies and run a revision. No longer spend a day or more to find and revise a month due to a simple attendance or calendar set-up error!
System Requirements:
This MARS Power Toolbox item has several set-up requirements: