A section is an occurrence of a course. Each course can have several sections that meet in different rooms at different times and are taught by different teachers. View, add, edit, and delete course sections from the School Setup page.
For example, a school has a chemistry course; however, because there are too many students for one class, there are several sections of chemistry. Two different teachers instruct it for four different periods each. Thus, the school has eight sections of chemistry. Each section has a different number, usually preceded by the same course number to indicate that it is part of the same chemistry course.
Each section has an associated schedule expression, which is the combination of periods and days in which this section is taught. For example, a section of Biology meets during fifth and sixth period on A and B days. The schedule expression 5-6(A-B) appears on the Edit Section page.
Navigate to the course page or the Teacher Schedule page. On the Course Section page, you can do the following:
Field
Description
Add a new section.
View information about this section.
View information about this section.
View term information for this section.
View the teacher's current schedule.
The room in which this course section meets.
The section's class roster.
Click the chair icon to record meeting attendance for a specific date. This icon only appears if attendance can be entered for the date or term.
Click the grid icon to record meeting attendance for a specific date range. This icon only appears if attendance can be entered for the date or term.
Make all students listed above the current selection
Click to work with the group of students in all of the sections of the selected course.
Consider the following when switching from PTG to PowerTeacher Pro:
Selecting PowerTeacher Pro will prompt teachers to migrate any existing PTG assignments for this section when they first launch PowerTeacher Pro.
The following items will NOT migrate from PTG:
For standards, PowerTeacher Pro uses grade scales instead of conversion scales. As part of the PowerSchool 10 upgrade, copies of conversion scales have been created as grade scales and attached to the appropriate standards. If the conversion scale is setup incorrectly, it will not create a grade scale, but will use what the district has set as the default grade scale. Be sure to review existing standards in PowerSchool and verify that the correct grade scales are associated to standards.
Enter the room in which this course section meets. When this value is left blank the current Lead Teacher's Homeroom (Users.Homeroom) value is used.
Enter the section number in this field. Do not enter special characters.
Section numbers must be unique among sections of the same course for a given school year.
If this course is available only for a certain grade level, enter the grade level. Otherwise, leave this field blank. The grade level entered here is used to filter courses using the Grade menu on the Mass Register and Available Courses pages.
The number of students currently enrolled in this course section.
Enter the maximum number of students who can enroll in this course section.
District Where Taught
If this course section is taught outside your district, enter the other district's ID in this field.
School Where Taught
If this course section is taught outside your school, enter the school's ID in this field.
If this course section has dependent sections, enter them in this field using the course.section, course.section format. If a student is enrolled in a class, it is not teacher-specific, but rather section-specific. Often used by elementary schools where students take a set of classes, dependent sections indicate that if a student is registered in one class, he or she must also register for the dependent class. If the dependent section conflicts with another class, you can manually drop the student from the class and add him or her to another section. This function has no implications with prerequisites or graduation requirements.
Intended primarily for California Continuation Education alternative education program, the program you specify here identifies whether backfill should be applied when attendance is taken for the section. For more information, refer to Backfill Management.
Automated Walk-In Scheduling Program Restrictions
Choose one of the following options:
If the Include option was selected, specify which special programs to include by doing one of the following:
Record Attendance Using Attendance Mode
Indicate the method by which you want attendance recorded. At this time, Meeting attendance is your only option.
If the section meets more than one period in a day, you can choose to take attendance once or for every period by selecting the Once for All Meetings option or the Each Meeting Separately option.
Exclude From Attendance
Select the checkbox if you do not want attendance and enrollment in this section to be counted towards any ADA/ADM calculations.
Exclude From Storing Final Grades
Use for sections that are not graded so blank records are not stored with final grades.
Do one of the following:
The Exclude From Storing Final Grades course value is noted in parenthesis.
Choose the grade scale.
The grade scale assigned to the course appears in parenthesis.
Exclude from GPA?
If different from the course settings, select the option to either include or exclude the grade from the GPA calculation.
The Exclude from GPA course value is noted in parenthesis.
Exclude from Class Rank?
If different from the course settings, select the option to either include or exclude the grade from the class rank calculation.
The Exclude from Class Rank course value is noted in parenthesis.
Exclude from Honor Roll?
If different from the course settings, select the option to either include or exclude the grade from the honor roll calculation.
The Exclude from Honor Roll course value is noted in parenthesis.
Identifies the section as open only to be filled by students whose course requests are designated as the same section type. Optionally, choose the type of section, such as Bilingual.
Identifies the section as open only to be filled by students who are designated as belonging to the same house. Whether this is enforced depends on the state of the scheduling preference Use Houses. Click Associate to select a house to which this section belongs.
Identifies the section as open only to be filled by students who are designated as belonging to the same team. Choose the team associated with this section.
Close section at max
Identifies whether to enroll students into the section even if the maximum enrollment has been reached. If this is selected, no students will be enrolled if the current enrollment is equal to or greater than the maximum enrollment. Select the checkbox to not accept more enrollments than the maximum number of enrolled students.
Maximum Load Status
Indicate whether the section should be exempt from counting towards a teacher's maximum student load:
At this time, the Non-Exempt selection is not saved on this page. Use USM to set sections as non-exempt. In the Sections table, set the Max_Load_Status field to Non-Exempt. For more information, refer to Teacher Maximum Load.
For existing non-exempt sections and for all new sections, no values are stored for this field unless they are set to Lab or Exempt on this page, or they set to any of the three status types using USM. Sections with no values are ignored when calculating the teacher maximum load.
Allow PowerTeacher entry of Variable Awarded Credit
Indicate whether or not to permit teachers to enter variable awarded credit, earned credit. If Yes is chosen, the Variable Awarded Credit column appears in PowerTeacher Gradebook on the Scoresheet in Final Grade mode. Teachers may enter any desired numerical value.
This menu only appears when editing a section. To set variable awarded credit for multiple sections, refer to Variable Credit.
Allow PowerTeacher entry of Variable Attempted Credit
Indicate whether or not to allow teachers to enter variable attempted credit, potential credit. If Yes is chosen, the Variable Attempted Credit column appears in PowerTeacher Gradebook on the Scoresheet in Final Grade mode. Teachers may enter any desired numerical value.
This menu only appears when editing a section.
When you delete a course section, all enrollment records associated with that section, both past and present, also are deleted. Therefore, you need to know the password to delete a course section.
Sections cannot be deleted if the current year contains one or more student sections (enrollments) with attendance records. If one or more students with attendance records are enrolled in a section being deleted, an error message appears and you must reset the attendance for each student enrolled in the section. If a section is successfully deleted (no orphan attendance is found), PowerSchool generates a query to find any attendance associated with the section. If attendance records are found, they are deleted. To modify attendance, refer to Attendance.
Teachers are assigned to a section on the Edit Section page. The PowerSchool administrator can add multiple section lead and additional staff/teachers to a section. The teacher-of-record is the section lead teacher, and other staff/teachers are the additional teachers.
A lead teacher must be designated for every day the section's term. Multiple lead teachers can be added for different days of the term, but no more than one teacher can be the lead teacher on any given day. This is done to keep a single teacher-of-record for every day the section meets, in order to remain compatible with systems that only allow for one teacher per section.
Note that "% Allocation" is only used for reporting purposes. It is not necessary to have allocation totals reach 100 percent, nor is it necessary to keep them below 100 percent.
For example:
Staff
Role
% Allocation
Start Date