How do I exit/drop a student from PowerSchool?

When a school has made the determination that a student needs to be dropped from the school, there are two primary things that we need to know in order to exit them from PowerSchool properly.

1) What was the first day that the student did NOT attend the school?  This is your EXIT DATE.

2) What was the reason that the student is being exited from the school?  This is your EXIT CODE.

Once you have confirmed the above information with your staff and have acquired all of the documentation necessary, you can follow these steps to perform the exit from PowerSchool.

Step 1:  Clear any recorded absences from the Exit Date and after.

It is very common that a student exits the School after a string of absences.  In this case, we must make them appear as present for those days or else we will not be able to exit the student due to the fact that we would be “orphaning attendance.”  In that case, we would get an error like this:

Instead, we can easily clear attendance by opening the student record and navigating to Attendance (Academics). *Be sure you are the school level and not district.

Once you identify the attendance to clear, go into each day to make them appear as if they are present:

Before:

Step 2:  Navigate to School Enrollment > Transfer Out Of School

Step 3:  Input your exit date and exit code before pressing submit.

Reminder:  The exit date is the FIRST DAY NOT ATTENDING school.  For Example, a student that had a last day at the school on 10/12 will have an exit date of 10/13.

Exit Codes are also very important as they are used by the state to determine whether students have enrollment conflicts at other schools, truancy issues and even drop outs.  Different schools, districts, and states can have wildly different Exit Codes so make sure to check with your local reporting entity or school leadership to make sure that the correct codes are programmed into the system.

If you are based in California, keep scrolling down for a list of State Reporting Exit Codes!

Step 4: Confirmation Screen

If you have exited the student properly, you should see a screen like this one below!

Bonus:  State-specific Exit Codes

• California –
  • View exit codes and their descriptions from the California Code Set (CALPADS).

• Vermont –
  • View exit codes and their descriptions from the Vermont AOE Knowledge Base (EdFusion).
• Massachusetts –
  • View exit codes and their descriptions from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (dese) Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
    • Using the left side panel menu, navigate to Student Information Management System (SIMS) link to view SIMS Support Documentation.

• Arizona –
  • View Arizona Department of Education’s Withdrawal Codes Cheat Sheet (AZED).
  • View exit codes and their descriptions from the Arizona Department of Education’s Grad Drop and Persistence Rate Tech Manual containing codes and definitions.
    • Scroll to the Table of Contents and search for various withdrawal codes.