Student Merit Store - Getting Started

1. Turn it on for your schools (District Office)

Everything is off until you enable at least one school.

• Go to District Management → District Setup → Student Merit Store Settings (you must be at the District Office to see this).
• Under Schools Using the Student Merit Store, check each school that should use it. Nothing — no menus, no store — appears at a school until it's checked here.
• While you're on this page, set the rest. These are the district defaults; unless you turn on school overrides, they apply everywhere:
  • School Overrides — off by default, so every enabled school uses the district settings. Turn it on to let each school override individual settings on its own page (see step 2). Schools Using the Student Merit Store is always district-controlled and can never be overridden.
  • Parent & Student Portal — who sees the read-only Merit Store page on the portal: Nobody, Students only, Guardians only, or both.
  • Allow barcode scanning — turn on to look students up by scanning at the store front, and pick which student field the barcode matches (Lunch ID by default).
  • Show the photo at the store front — show the student's photo beside their name at checkout.
  • Organize store front items — show items as one flat list, grouped By Category (uncategorized last), or grouped By Point Value (cheapest first). Applies to the store front and to the student/guardian portal.
  • Store front instructions — rich text shown at the top of the store front (e.g. store hours).
  • Naming — rename the currency. Fill in a singular and a plural name (e.g. "Paw Point" / "Paw Points") and it replaces the word "point" everywhere students, families and teachers see it. Leave both blank for the built-in wording. Both forms are needed because a one-point item reads differently from a three-point one. Setup pages keep the built-in wording so district staff can still find things. Quotation marks and apostrophes are stripped automatically — the name is used inside database queries, where those characters would break the page.
  • Teachers can award points to — Students in their classes (the default) or Any student in the school. Controls which students the teacher portal's Award Merit Points page offers. Their classes includes sections where the teacher is a co-teacher or associate. A teacher's own per-student Merit Store page is unaffected, because PowerSchool only opens those for students on that teacher's schedule.
  • Behavior point values — whether staff may edit a behavior's points when awarding: Allow users to edit (the default), Force default on teacher entry, or Force default on teacher and admin entry. Admin entry is the student page and Mass Award; teacher entry is the teacher's student page and Award Merit Points.
  • Manual "Other" entry — behavior menus include an Other (manual entry) choice by default, letting staff type their own description and point value. Check the box to remove it, so staff can only award behaviors you have defined.
  • Points carry over from year to year — off by default, so each student's balance and history reset at the start of every school year. Turn it on to make balances all-time, so unspent points follow the student into the next year.
• Click Submit. (Menus appear at a school only once it's selected here — so test the rest of the setup at a school, not at the District Office.)

2. Set up each enabled school (select a school first)

Switch to an enabled school using the school picker, then work through School Management → Merit Store:

• Merit Store - Settings — only present if you turned on School Overrides in step 1. Every district setting except Schools Using the Student Merit Store can be overridden here. Each row has an Override district setting checkbox: leave it unchecked and the school inherits, with the district's value shown greyed out so you can see what it's inheriting. Check it to set the school's own value. Unchecking it again clears the school's value on save, so the school goes back to following the district.
• Merit Store - Behaviors — define the things students earn points for (name + default points). Retire one by editing it and unchecking Active (this keeps past awards intact); delete is only offered for behaviors never awarded.
• Merit Store - Item Categories — optional groupings for store items (name + sort order). Only visible in the store if you set Organize store front items to By Category; items with no category are listed last.
• Merit Store - Store Items — define what students can buy: title, point cost, an optional picture (auto-resized; landscape ~500px wide works best), a category, a per-student limit, a grade-level restriction, and a Quantity available (blank = unlimited). Quantity counts down as items are purchased. Closed items are hidden from the store but kept.

Behaviors, categories and items are per school — set them up at each enabled school.

3. Award points

• One student (admin): open the student, go to their Behavior → Merit Store page. Pick a behavior (or "Other" for a manual entry), set points, save. The same page shows the student's balance and history.
• Many students (admin): make a student selection, then Start Page group functions → Mass Award Merit Points (also under People → Students → Student Administration). It awards to your whole current selection at once.
• Teachers: a Award Merit Points page in the left navigation lets a teacher award to individual students or a whole class roster — which students it offers follows Teachers can award points to in step 1. Teachers also get a per-student Merit Store page in a class's Student Information section.

Removing a point record: on the admin student page, each row in the points history has a red ✖ at the right; click it and a Confirm button appears. Only staff with modify access to the page see it — read-only users don't. A delete that would push the student's balance below zero (because they have already spent the points) is refused with a warning, so redemption history can't be left stranded. Deleting is for correcting mistakes; to stop using a behavior going forward, retire it instead.

Points reset each school year unless you turned on Points carry over in step 1 — by default a balance is this year's earned minus this year's spent. Long histories are shown 20 rows at a time.

4. Run the store front (staffed checkout)

• Applications → Merit Store - Store Front in the admin nav.
• Look a student up by name, or by scanning a barcode if you enabled it.
• Their balance and the items available to them appear. Narrow a long catalogue with the filters above the items — Name contains, Category, and Min/Max points — and Clear to reset them.
• Add items to the cart — the cart caps at the student's balance, each item's per-student limit, and remaining stock, disabling anything they can't get.
• Check Out writes the redemptions and decrements stock. A confirmation flashes; the balance and stock refresh on the spot.

5. Portals (read-only)

If you set a Portal Audience in step 1, students and/or guardians get a Merit Store link in the portal showing that student's balance, the items currently available to them, the points they have earned (date, points, behavior and any note), and their past redemptions. There's no checkout here — redeeming happens only at the staffed store front.

6. Reports

Data and Reporting → Reports → Student Merit Store (at a school) has three tabs:

• Points Earned & Redeemed — earned, redeemed and current balance per student. Use Include students with no points to show or hide students with no activity.
• Items Purchased — quantity redeemed and points spent per item, for this school's catalogue. This is where you see how many of an item sold (the item's "Quantity available" only shows what's left). Points a student spent at another school count in their balance but cannot appear here.
• Leaderboard — top point earners, with its own period control (a month or a term).

The first two tabs each have a From / To date range, defaulting to the full school year. Set it to report on a week, a month, or a single day, and Whole year puts it back. The range filters Earned, Redeemed and the item counts — but not the Balance column, which is always the student's real spendable balance (labelled All Time Balance when carry-over is on). The Leaderboard is not affected; it uses its own period control instead.

Export CSV on either of the first two tabs downloads exactly what's on screen — the date range, sort order, filter and the no-points toggle all carry through to the file.

Locking down access (optional)

If you restrict this by security group, note the store front relies on several helper pages behind the scenes (data feeds + checkout writers). Granting a group access to the store-front page alone isn't enough. When you enter Modify Page Permissions mode on the store front, a note with direct links to each helper page appears in PowerSchool's gold permissions bar — grant the group modify access to those too, or checkout will fail silently.