Bearly Passing
Note: I am no longer a High School student. Any descriptions about the PowerSchool software refer to the version my district used for the 2023–2024 academic year.
BearlyPassing was an alternate frontend for the PowerSchool Student Information System. It was created as a high school independent study project with Jasmine Acker.
It was only released as an extremely small closed beta for feedback. It was never released publicly, due to the complications of FERPA compliance and the risk of attracting PowerSchool’s lawyers.
Features
- Comprehensive front page (dashboard) that provides important stats at a glance
- Sortable grades view
- List of teachers with contact information
- Interactive schedule
I’m currently working on a demo version of BearlyPassing with random generated data, but it’s taking a hot minute. This section will be filled when I can take screenshots from the demo.
Fetching data from Powerschool
This project made use of an undocumented SOAP API in PowerSchool that appears to be from the days Powerschool was still owned by Pearson (2006-2015). There is a single endpoint which takes a student’s username and password and returns a large payload containing student information, courses taken, assignment grades, class schedules, along with a bunch of other random items.
This endpoint was already known when we started the project, and many libraries exist to utilise it, including pywerschool (Python) and PowerSchool-API (Node.js). However, anecdotal evidence while testing seems to suggest that some newer instances of PowerSchool (each district/school has their own instance) no longer have this endpoint.