Administrative Announcements

If you have the necessary security permissions, you can send an announcement to the staff at a particular location or system-wide. The announcement can optionally be targeted at one or more specific security groups. If logins have been enabled for this, announcements can also be sent to students and parents.

An announcement can be an immediate announcement or a calendar announcement.

• Immediate announcements are posted to the home page of recipients as soon as they are sent, and higher priority announcements can be configured to display in a pop-up message that users must read and acknowledge. Announcements expire on the date or time you specify.

• Calendar announcements are used to announce an event that can appear on the target users' calendars. An authorized sender can choose whether recipients can manually add the announced event to their calendars or whether the event should automatically be added to calendars.

Send an Immediate Announcement

1. Select Communication > Announcements.

2. Click Send Immediate Announcement. 

3. Use the Recipients fields to select who should receive the announcement.

   • Depending on your access privileges, you can make the announcement system-wide or to a particular location. If available, use the At Location field to specify your choice.

   • Use the checkboxes to select the types of users to receive the announcement.

   • To further limit the staff receiving the announcement, select Limit by Security Group, then choose one or more security groups. To select multiple security groups, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking each group.

4. In the Expires When? field, select when you want the announcement to expire. An announcement can appear on the recipient's home page until it expires.

5. Fill in the Subject and Body of the announcement.

6. Complete the following as needed:

   • Choose the priority of the announcement.
     For High priority or Red Alert announcements, the following options become available:

     • Require User Acknowledgement.

     • Forward To Recipients' Internet Email Address (sends the entire announcement contents to the specified recipients in an email message)

   • Indicate whether you want to allow recipients to send a reply message.

   • Optionally, color-code the announcement.

   • Optionally, click Select to attach one or more files.

7. Send the announcement.

Announcement Priority

You can send an announcement with one of the following priority levels:

• Low: Low-priority announcements are automatically removed from the home page of recipients when such announcements are opened. Recipients can manually restore the announcement to their home page if they wish.

• Normal: Recipients can manually remove the announcement from their home page.

• High: High-priority announcements are shown in larger text than Normal priority on the home page of recipients and can also appear in a pop-up message that recipients must read and acknowledge. Recipients cannot remove high-priority announcements from their home page, although such announcements will automatically be removed when they expire.

• Red Alert: This priority is available only to the system administrator or users who have been granted a special security privilege for sending red alert announcements. This priority is available for immediate announcements but not calendar-based announcements. 
  Red alert announcements appear in red in their home page panel, separate from regular announcements. Red alert announcements can also appear in a pop-up message that recipients must read and acknowledge. Recipients cannot remove red alert announcements from their home page, although such announcements will automatically be removed when they expire.

Create a Calendar Announcement

1. Select Communication > Announcements.

2. Click Send Calendar-Based Announcement.

3. Use the Recipients fields to select who should receive the announcement.

4. Specify either the start and end date and time, or select the option specifying an all-day event.

5. Select the appropriate recipient calendar mode:

   • Manually Add to Calendar: With this mode selected, recipients can add the calendar event to their calendar.

   • Automatically Add to Calendar: With this mode selected, the calendar event is automatically added to recipients' calendars.

   • Automatically Add to Calendar (do not post to home page): With this mode selected, the calendar event is automatically added to recipients' calendars.

6. Fill in the Subject and Body of the announcement.

7. Complete the following as needed:

   • Choose the priority of the announcement.
     For High Priority announcements, the following checkbox option becomes available:

     • Forward To Recipients' Internet Email Address (sends the entire announcement contents to the specified recipients in an email).

   • Indicate whether you want to allow recipients to send a reply message.

   • Optionally color-code the announcement.

   • Optionally attach one or more files by clicking Select below the body.

8. When you are ready to send the announcement, click Send.

Forward To Recipients' Internet Email Address

This option is only available for High priority or Red Alert announcements. Selecting this option sends the announcement contents as an email to the email addresses of all recipients with an active login, an active profile, an available email address, and who are in the organizational scope of the sender. Only material suitable for email should be included in the subject or body when this option is selected.

Advanced: For efficiency, the system will group up to 40* recipient email addresses in the BCC field of email messages generated from the announcement (e.g., if there are 2000 recipient email addresses, then 2000 / 40 = 50 email messages will be sent). 40 is a default used in PowerSchool cloud operations. On-premise customers can change this grouping value.

Cancel an Announcement

1. Select Communication > Announcements.

2. Find the announcement in the Announcements > Sent box, then click on it to select it.

3. Click Delete.

View Read by List

1. Select Communication > Announcements.

2. Find the announcement in the Announcements > Sent box, then click on it.
   Just above the body of the announcement, you will see a count of the users who read the announcement. This count is labeled Read by.

3. Click the count to view or print a list of the user identifiers and names. Users who read the announcement after it expires are not counted or listed.

Revise a Sent Announcement

1. Select Communication > Announcements.

2. Find the announcement in the Announcements > Sent box, then click on it.

3. With the announcement selected, click Send Revised Announcement.

Note that if the announcement you are revising is a calendar announcement that users could manually add to their calendar, users will need to add the revision to their calendar again if the date or time changes from the original.

View Who Manually Added an Event to their Calendar

This applies only if the recipient calendar mode was set to Manually Add to Calendar when the announcement was sent.

1. Select Communication > Announcements.

2. Find the announcement in the Announcements > Sent box, then click on it.
   Above the announcement body, you will see a count of the users who added the calendar announcement to their calendar. This count is labeled Added to Calendar by.

3. Click the count to view or print a list of the user identifiers and names.