A K-12 agent that reads PowerSchool attendance, pulls Canvas grade trends, and drafts an at-risk-student brief needs a place its interpretation lives. PowerSchool is the SIS of record. Canvas is the LMS of record. Neither is built to hold "the agent looked at this student on Tuesday, flagged a pattern, and the assistant principal signed off." Dock is. Every brief lands as a row with the agent's name, the decision, the reviewer who approved it, and pointers back to the PowerSchool student ID and Canvas course it came from. See the wider pattern in Dock for Education.
PowerSchool and Canvas stay the system of record for the raw data. Dock is the system of record for what the AGENT INTERPRETS. Each Dock row carries a pointer back to the platform record, agent identity, decision, reviewer, and timestamp. The agent re-fetches platform data via fresh API reads when it needs current state.
The surface: Student Progress Briefs
| Student (PS ID) | Canvas course | Agent finding | Agent | Admin reviewer | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10482 (Rivera, M.) | ENG-9B | 3-week attendance dip + missing 2 essays; recommend counselor referral | sis-watcher-agent | a.chen@district | Approved 2026-05-28 |
| 11907 (Okafor, D.) | ALG-1 | Grade trend stable; flagged false-positive from late gradebook sync | sis-watcher-agent | a.chen@district | Dismissed 2026-05-29 |
| 10221 (Patel, S.) | BIO-10 | New IEP accommodation not reflected in 2 assignments; route to SPED lead | sis-watcher-agent | r.gomez@district | Routed 2026-05-30 |
The row is the unit of review. An admin opens one, sees the agent's reasoning, the PowerSchool link, and the Canvas pull, and decides. Attribution patterns are covered in agent audit and compliance.
One worked workflow: weekly at-risk sweep
Every Monday at 6am the agent re-fetches PowerSchool attendance for the prior week and Canvas gradebook deltas. For each student crossing a configured threshold it writes a row to Student Progress Briefs with the finding, the source records, and status: Pending. The assistant principal works the queue. Approvals trigger the counselor referral surface. Dismissals stay logged so the next sweep does not re-raise the same false positive. The agent never writes back to PowerSchool. It writes to Dock; humans act on PowerSchool. The identity binding that makes this attributable is described in agent identity.
Why it matters
The OECD's Education at a Glance reports show districts collect far more student data than they review; the constraint is administrative attention, not data. PowerSchool's own product framing positions the SIS as the operational record, not the interpretation layer. An agent that drafts interpretations into Dock turns a 400-student caseload into a triaged queue with named accountability on every decision. Compare the research-team variant in Dock for research. Credential lifecycle for the sis-watcher-agent itself follows the pattern in agent identity lifecycle.
Get started
Point your SIS agent at a Dock workspace. Keep PowerSchool and Canvas as systems of record. Let Dock hold the brief, the reviewer, and the trail. Read the cluster overview at Dock for education.
FAQ
Does Dock replace PowerSchool? No. PowerSchool remains the SIS of record for enrollment, attendance, grades, and compliance reporting. Dock holds only what the agent interprets from PowerSchool and the human decision on top.
Who is accountable when the agent flags a student incorrectly? The reviewer who approved or dismissed the row. Every Dock row stores agent identity, reviewer, decision, and timestamp, so a false positive has a named human signoff trail.
Does the agent write back into PowerSchool or Canvas? No. The pattern is read-only against both platforms. Humans take the action in PowerSchool or Canvas after reviewing the Dock row. This keeps the SIS and LMS authoritative.
How does this handle FERPA and student-data privacy? Dock rows reference student records by ID and store only the agent's interpretation and the reviewer's decision. Access controls follow the same scoping you grant the agent in PowerSchool, and every read is logged against the agent's identity.
