Student Historical Footprint/Grades Missing in Canvas upon Drop/Transfer

[srosebrock]

Can anyone offer any advice on why Canvas would not allow a school to view the historical grades/enrollment of a student who has transferred out of a district/school? Background: We are a PowerSchool/Canvas school. Our IT Department does NOT sync grades automatically to PS from Canvas because of the hundreds of errors that would populate daily in our building. This was completed last year before I received my current position. Transfers happen to and from our building frequently (often for the same student) because we are a vocational high school, but our records have to be on point at all times.

My building specifically needs to have student records saved for auditing purposes. Yet, upon transfer/drop/expulsion/graduation, the student’s records are completely wiped as though they’ve never existed. We use PowerSchool as our SIS Import system/records platform. PowerSchool swears it’s Canvas; Canvas swears it’s PowerSchool. Our office admin have not changed their system operation for storing/collecting records for the above-mentioned situations, they are following state reporting mandates that have been in place for many years, and we are stumped! In the event of an audit (a regular occurrence at our vocational school to ensure we are up to date on licenses and program requirements), we need to be able to pull grade information from Canvas to match the record stored in PowerSchool. The former Tech Coord. In our building states that it would be reasonable to assume a disconnect of some kind happened somewhere at the start of the year when we first saw this issue. However, trying to troubleshoot this long is frustrating and I thought perhaps someone out there would have had experience with this? Why aren't previously enrolled students listed in their former classes in perpetuity?

Our current work-a-round is prior to the transfer/drop in PS, admin print/download the historical grades from Canvas so they match in PowerSchool. This cannot be our long term solution (the sheer mass of information this would create would be overwhelming to keep track of). What are we missing?

Thanks in advance!

Thank you in advance.

[chriscas]

Hi @srosebrock,

Unfortunately, I don't have knowledge about powerschool, but I might be at least able to point you in a possible direction to research.  It sounds like that's happening when a student drops/transfers is that powerschool is setting the enrollment status is Canvas to "deleted".  When an enrollment is deleted, it's just as you describe, like the student was never even in the course... Grades are done, they don't show in the people list, etc.  I *think* what you may want instead is to use the "inactive" enrollment status for this situation.  When you set a student enrollment to inactive, the student can't get into the course anymore, but their information is retained.  In the people list they will show with an "inactive" tag (warning, some teachers don't like seeing the dropped students there, so you may get complaints about that), and in the gradebook there is a "show inactive" option you can enable to see the inactive students and all of their grades.  If this sounds desirable, perhaps mentioning to powerschool that you'd like to use inactive instead of deleted might spark something on their end and get this configured how you'd like it!

-Chris