January 13, 2015
TO:
Superintendents
FROM:
June Atkinson
SUBJECT:
What you need to know about Home Base as we start 2015
Happy New Year! As we start 2015 and many of you are closing out a semester and getting ramped
up for another, we just wanted to make sure that you are all aware of recent fixes, improvements or
additions to Home Base.
PowerSchool
Update
During the December maintenance weekend updates were made to the
State Compliance Reports Workflow to introduce more flexibility for
what schools are being reported. In addition, there were updates to the
following reports:
 Principal’s Monthly Report (PMR) Data Collection
 School Activity Report (SAR) Data Collection
 Retention/Promotion (RP) Data Collection
 Dropout Data Collection
 Academically or Intellectually Gifted (AIG) Data Collection
 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) Part 1 and 2
Production
Releases
Athletic Eligibility, minus the Scholar Athletic and Scholar Team
reports. The Scholar Athletic and Scholar Team reports are in NC DPI
QA, and we plan to release them this month.
Phase II of the North Carolina Graduation Plans, including the
following enhancements:
 Occupational Course of Study (OCS)
 Fix for each Endorsement GPA by using the GPA from Class
Rank rather than current plus credits
 New Grad Plan – Extended Content Standards (ECS)
 Ability for LEAs to add local graduation requirements
 New endorsements are available
 Updated views from single view to tabular view
 LEA can now view all graduation plans (state and local)
NC Custom Reports for Planned Accommodations including IEP,
LEP, 504 and Transitory planned accommodations.
OFFICE OF THE STATE SUPERINTENDENT
June St. Clair Atkinson, Ed.D., State Superintendent | june.atkinson@dpi.nc.gov
6301 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-6301 | (919) 807-3430 | Fax (919) 807-3445
AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER
Page 2, January 13, 2015
What you need to know about Home Base
SQL4 Reports for CPR are now in production, which includes:
 Created 8th Grade CPR Import
 Students Missing CPR Test information
 Students With Completed CPR Test
Schoolnet Update
The NCDPI and Pearson teams have applied a number of improvements
to Schoolnet Version 16.0 to enhance and optimize the software.
Additionally, there are three major improvements that have been made to
distribute and balance the load on Schoolnet. They are as follows:

Assessments – Created a dedicated database instance to serve the
assessment administration activities

Assessment Reporting – Created a read-only database instance to
serve selected reporting activities

Static Content – Added a Content Delivery Network (CDN),
which will place static content closer to the requester without
placing additional burden on the application servers
This helps to ensure that, on heavy user days (such as benchmark
assessments) the system has been improved to handle higher volumes of
users.
Information
Requested
In order for us to have the most up-to-date information in one place and
to be able to anticipate peak testing time, we ask that you fill out a quick
and simple form to let us know about your plans for benchmarking. To
access the form, please go to http://goo.gl/MB5oax. Please complete by
Friday, January 23.
We want to continue to make sure that you have the latest information on what we are doing to
improve Home Base for all of our users across the state. To stay informed about improvements,
maintenance schedules and more, please follow our Home Base Alerts on Twitter.
Thank you for your continued patience and support.