What’s New for Back-to-School: Sharing the Spark of Education

As educators and families prepare for the 2025-2026 school year, we all can agree that the demands on education are more diverse and challenging than ever before. From chronic absenteeism, to communicating with families more effectively; planning for college & career readiness, to making the most out of your budgets, educators must address immediate needs while also finding a way to not just plan for — but implement — the future of education.

In 2025, PowerSchool dug deep into these issues — reinforced by our 2025 National U.S. Educator Survey, reflecting insights from 2,500+ respondents—and worked with you to inform new solutions to help solve today’s teaching and learning challenges. We leverage these insights, including respondents’ top edtech priorities, to: 

• Guide our product innovation to empower educators around the world 
• Help districts run more efficiently 
• Support personalized learning efforts through responsible AI. 

As we head into the new school year, we continue to celebrate you: teachers, staff, administrators, students, and parents. We are firm in our commitment to bring new tools and rich sources of information to help make an impact in districts worldwide.

Here are some insights about new tools we’ve developed to support your continued impact on K-12 education.

Supporting student attendance and engagement 

Throughout our conversations with educators, it’s clear that chronic absenteeism and student engagement challenges persist. In fact, 26% of students nationwide were still missing at least 10% of the school year as of 2023.

That’s why we developed PowerSchool Attendance Intervention, which enables school leaders to track and view actionable attendance data and monitor attendance trends to identify early warning signs of chronic absenteeism​. This product also enables educators to deploy customized, automatically generated digital attendance postcards — research-backed, data-driven interventions proven to reduce chronic absenteeism. For this back to school, let’s work together to inspire students to attend from the start.             

Recently, Nicole Bond, Director of Enrollment & Attendance at Haywood County Schools in Brownsville, Tennessee, implemented Attendance Intervention as part of their attendance strategy a great example of how to engage students positively. 

Establish Stronger Relationships with Attendance Intervention

Once students are in the classroom, keeping them engaged, ideally through more personalized teaching and learning, can be a challenge. The right education technology, when built responsibly and integrated into the tools already used in the classroom, can transform learning for students and save teachers time. In fact, according to our 2025 Educator Survey, 93% of educators say edtech increases student engagement. However, providing professional development time and resources to educators on how to use these tools effectively remains a challenge. 

To address this challenge, we’ve continued to deliver new AI-powered tools across PowerSchool’s product suite. Recently, we announced the general availability of PowerSchool Coaching & Mentoring, a new platform powered by PowerBuddy — an AI assistant — and designed to deliver coaching insights and personalized mentorship experiences for educators. 

Hear from Sarah Connors, SMS Program Manager at Colorado Springs D11 School District about how PowerSchool Coaching & Mentoring is powering their focus on coaching in the upcoming school year. 

Coaching and Mentoring for Every Teacher

Embedding AI tools to support teachers and save time 

We also know educators are increasingly recognizing the value of AI to help them personalize teaching and save time to focus on student engagement and instruction. Recent data shows 70% of district leaders agree that AI has the potential to enhance teaching and learning. Educators are seeing measurable results: teachers using AI tools report saving an average of 5.9 hours per week, which is equivalent to nearly six full weeks of instructional time over the course of a school year.

This school year PowerSchool is making it easier for educators to access PowerBuddy tools that support some of the most commonly used types of content. Available at no additional cost, teachers using PowerSchool Schoology Learning, PowerSchool SIS, PowerSchool Curriculum & Instruction, and PowerSchool Naviance CCLR can access AI-powered content generation tools that simplify lesson planning and curriculum development—making it easier to create engaging, standards-aligned materials in less time.  

Building smarter career and college readiness tools for students and counselors  

We also understand the evolving needs of post-secondary planning and the challenges school leaders face in providing individualized career and college readiness supports. According to a study by American Student Assistance, 79% of high school students express interest in participating in work-based learning, but only 34% are aware of available opportunities. And just 2% have completed an internship during high school. Yet, research from Brookings identifies work-based learning as a critical lever for advancing student equity and economic opportunity.  

To address this gap, and create an even more intuitive, personalized, and engaging journey through college and career planning for students and school counselors, this week at our annual flagship conference, EDGE, we announced major enhancements to PowerSchool Naviance CCLR, available this school year.   

The 2025-2026 Naviance release also introduces multiple enhancements that personalize exploration and streamline counselor support. This includes updates to PowerBuddy for College and Career, available at no additional cost for Naviance CCLR customers.  

Students using PowerBuddy for College and Career, an AI assistant that supports personalized postsecondary planning, can access tools to explore strengths, interests, and career pathways. They can gain equitable access to resources that help them plan for their futures and connect with real-world opportunities.

This blog post shares more about what’s new in Naviance CCLR. 

Our commitment to cybersecurity 

As a leading global provider of K-12 education technology, PowerSchool understands the importance of cybersecurity and takes our responsibility to protect student, family, and educator data privacy extremely seriously.   

At PowerSchool, our approach to security focuses on four key areas:  

• Culture: Security is everyone’s responsibility at PowerSchool. We foster a culture of shared accountability across every team, firmly rooted in our obligation to protect the communities we serve.  
• Validation and Certification: Demonstrating our deep commitment to data security, risk management, and customer trust, we undertake annual third-party audits to confirm our security measures meet or exceed industry-defined standards. These accredited firms provide unbiased validation for our approach and empower us to continue to set the standard.  
• Posture: We invest heavily in all aspects of security technologies and practices, ensuring our solutions remain ahead of evolving threats, including within our infrastructure and system security, monitoring, and threat detection, as well as access and credentialing practices.  
• Industry Collaboration: Finally, we believe collaboration is key to strengthening security across the education industry. We work alongside industry leaders, organizations, and policymakers to advance cybersecurity for all.  

As part of our commitment to improving cybersecurity and data privacy across the industry, we recently published a free assessment tool security framework to assist education leaders in developing and assessing their tools and vendors against industry standards. 

Looking ahead: transforming education into the future 

As we enter a new school year, PowerSchool is partnering with our customers to continue growing the largest K-12 education technology community and support what students need most: a personalized educational experience that helps them find their spark. We look forward to creating new stories of transformation with districts and education leaders all over the world next year and beyond.