My job each day revolves around PowerSchool.
It's the base for everything I do. It's used for attendance, scheduling, reports, addresses, grades, finding a student's homeroom and the list goes on. It doesn't crash often, but when it does, well - there's not much left for me to do but look pretty while answering the phone and door.
The disadvantage of being both a parent and working with PowerSchool as part of my job, is that I lose the ability to see things the way that parents see them. If I try to log out of my admin log in and log back in as a parent, it automatically bumps me right back into my admin view. The first time it happened, I thought it was me. But no - it's a PowerSchool quirk. It recognizes me to the point that I can only be an admin, not a parent. It's happened both on my computer at work and my laptop here at home because I do a fair amount of work from my recliner.
It's a weird quirk, but workable - as I just cheat then and look at what I need to for my own kids from the back door. Like today, when I wanted to see their 1st semester report card grades.
BUT. It makes it challenging to try and troubleshoot issues that parents are having if I can't go in the parent door and try to figure out what it is that's happening and work out what's causing it. Case in point today. I wanted to figure out a certain toggle in school forms. I wanted to know if it's something that parents can change, or how and where it comes into play.
I wanted to figure it out badly enough, that I went into my own kid's PowerSchool and reset my parent password - having long forgotten it.
I then came home and logged into the parent portal from my kid's computer - the only way that I've been able to successfully log into the parent portal; from a computer that I don't use regularly.
Logged in, the alert message came up that an admin had changed my password, and I would now need to update my password. !!!
What?! Why had an admin changed my password when I had just, this very day, gone in and done it myself.
Then.
Oh.
Wait.
The admin was me.
I'm actually a little disappointed in myself that I didn't catch on quicker.
A new new password created, and in I am. As a parent.
I proceed to the update school forms option, and.......
ugh. A notice that I need to create another new log in and username in order to do that.
I gave up.
Another day or another way.