Delivering Data You Can Trust

One of the most common requests we’ve received from users since launching RealTime Reports is the addition of Report Based Security. Districts and schools need a way to easily view and manage the reports a particular user can access. 

With Report Based Security, administrative-level users can now easily control access permissions for Realtime Reports modules for specific users.

Getting started is simple - follow the outlined steps below!

As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the nation, schools everywhere were discovering a somber truth - many people within their districts couldn’t count on a reliable internet connection. One district in rural Texas located due-South of the Greater Austin area found that 1-in-3 people, counting staff and students alike, lived in “dead zones” without internet or cell service. They were completely cut-off from the digital world at home through no fault of their own and falling behind because of it.

Education is unique among industry sectors because of the extreme rate of turnover. When viewed from a 30,000-foot perspective, the "churn-rate" for students enrolling, transferring, dropping out or graduating from even a modestly sized district is enough to eclipse all but the biggest multinational companies. Add in the rate of burnout for educators - roughly 50% of teachers leave the field within their first 5 years - and it's plain to see why having a holistic account provisioning plan is critical for a district's technology infrastructure, digital security and user access plans. 

According to a recent study, a majority of surveyed districts used at least 26 different software applications to meet the needs of their needs. The demands of the front office are wholly different than the needs of a teacher's gradebook, the lunchroom's food service database and the transportation department's CRM. With a smattering of different systems employed, a range of potential security risks is all but inevitable. 

The majority of school districts in the United States employ at least 26 different software platforms or applications to meet the functional demands of their district. Trying to manually guide data across so many platforms while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of that information would require hours of work from a dedicated team - time and resources that many districts simply can’t afford to sacrifice on peripheral tasks. 

Maximizing school district funding value is crucial in the education landscape of today. School districts work hard to ensure that every penny of available reimbursement dollars is fully accounted for.

Over 700 breaches of K-12 databases have been recognized in the United States alone since 2017. Phishing schemes, ransomware attacks and denials-of-service tactics have been employed to access or distribute sensitive information belonging to students, faculty and staff. 

Level Data applications integrate tightly with PowerSchool. These include page enhancement applications like RealTime Validation, and full page applications like State Data Validation and Validation Reporting.

Each of these applications has options available to help District Administrators apply the appropriate security options, as per their district policies and following PowerSchool security guidelines.

This document outline how Level Data’s PowerSchool applications integrate with PowerSchool’s security mechanisms in order to properly secure the applications.

Several months ago, we made significant updates with respect to respect PowerSchool’s two main security mechanisms: Page Level Security and Field Level Security. Please be sure to update your SDVS bundle soon. Version 2.x will no longer be supported as of April 1, and will be deactivated entirely on July 1, 2020.

The only way to prevent disruptions to your service is update your bundle to the latest version.

This document outlines three methods of installing Level Data’s PowerSchool applications, and provides a brief overview of the security configuration settings.

Contact data from the original core contact fields in PowerSchool were automatically migrated to the new contacts structure in PowerSchool 11.1. Contact data was migrated for all students that have ever existed within a PowerSchool database - both active and inactive.

The State Data Validation Suite (SDVS) generic contacts rules consist of 21 rules on a “Contacts” tab and 15 rules on a “Contacts Reports” tab. These rules are provided to help users clean up existing and/or new contact data.