Connect PowerSchool for attendance (read-only)
Install the AskElira plugin in your own PowerSchool, paste the client ID and secret it generates, and daily attendance arrives on its own — read-only, off unless your Order Form elects it, and not read at all until the PowerSchool notice period has run.
If your school runs PowerSchool, Elira can read attendance straight from it instead of you exporting a file every morning. It is read-only: we request view-only access to a named list of fields, we never write anything back, and disabling the plugin in PowerSchool stops us immediately.
What you get
Elira reads who is enrolled and each school day's attendance — including the days a child was present. That last part matters more than it sounds. Chronic-absence rates in New York are measured against days *enrolled*, so a file listing only absences cannot produce a rate, and Elira refuses to state one rather than guess. A PowerSchool feed carries the present days too, so your attendance tiers light up with no extra work from your office.
Install the plugin (about 10 minutes, one time)
Your own PowerSchool administrator does this. PowerSchool the company is not involved and there is nothing to buy.
- Download the plugin from Connect PowerSchool.
- In PowerSchool, go to System Management → Server → Plugin Management Setup, press Install, and upload that file.
- PowerSchool lists every field the plugin asks for. Every line should read "ViewOnly." If any line says FullAccess, stop and tell us — it is not our plugin. Approve the list and set the plugin to Enabled.
- Open the plugin's Plugin Configuration → Data Provider Configuration page. PowerSchool generated a Client ID and a Client Secret when it installed. Copy both.
Connect it (about 1 minute)
On Connect PowerSchool you give three things: your PowerSchool server address, the Client ID, and the Client Secret. Both values are encrypted the instant you submit them — nobody at AskElira, and no database, holds your secret in plain text.
You also tick one box confirming that your signed Order Form or amendment elects this integration. That is not a formality: the integration is off for every school unless it is elected in writing, and without the box nothing is stored.
Press Submit & test connection and we take a token and make two read calls straight away, so you find out on the page whether it worked rather than the next morning. A failed test keeps the form open: re-copy the values from Data Provider Configuration and submit again.
What we read, and what we never touch
We read: who is enrolled, their grade, the guardian phone, email and name a notice is addressed to, each school day's attendance code and what your own codes mean, and your school calendar's in-session days — so a closure is never read as a room full of absences.
We never read: social security numbers, medical or health records, discipline records, grades, or the free-text comment on an attendance record. A field our plugin does not name cannot be read even if it were granted by hand.
We never write. There is no code path in AskElira that writes to PowerSchool at all.
What has to be true before anything is read
PowerSchool is published on our subprocessor schedule and has been in force since schedule v1.9 (September 2026) — but in force is not switched on. Two things of your own still gate it: your signed Order Form or amendment has to elect the integration (DPA §3.3), and your own administrator has to approve the plugin's view-only fields. Until both are done, your credential is stored and encrypted and nothing is read from your PowerSchool, so keep uploading your daily attendance file exactly as you do now. Your connect page tells you which state you are in.
If the named query is missing
The plugin ships a report inside it that is what makes present days available. If it did not install, Elira falls back to reading only the exceptions PowerSchool records — which still tells families about an absence, but leaves the chronic-absence card refusing to state a rate. Re-installing the plugin from the link above fixes it.