What’s New – June 23, 2026

When students answer essay questions on online assessments, they can now use additional formatting tools to better organize and present their responses.

Essay answers now support:

• Bulleted lists

• Tables

• Subscript and superscript

• Strikethrough

• Special characters

These updates give students more flexibility to structure complex answers, include detailed content, and communicate ideas more clearly during assessments.

In this update, we've removed the old Podium experience for Distinctions, replacing it with a modern look and feel through SKY. The Course Distinctions page under Grading setup now features a modern style list with a search box, context menu for managing existing distinctions, and easy to read columns. Use +New to create a new distinction to add to the list.

Billing clerks no longer need to manually clean up processing fee charges tied to failed payments or enrollment deposits. When handling a failed transaction, the system now automatically removes the associated processing fee charge along with the payment.

To get started, open a failed payment or enrollment deposit and select the option to handle it. A confirmation modal will appear with the title Handle this failed payment? If a processing fee charge is associated with the payment, the modal displays the charge amount as a clickable link (which opens a flyout of the charge record) and indicates how it will be handled:

• Unposted charge: the processing fee will be deleted.

• Posted charge: the processing fee will be reversed using the same reversal date as the payment.

Select Handle payment to confirm, or Cancel to dismiss the window without making changes. If no processing fee is associated with the payment, the modal shows only the title and buttons.

With the June 2 release, visa and passport were moved to special access to protect this sensitive personal information. Users with special access can view this information in Contact cards and SKY lists (User lists, Student lists, and Candidates lists), although it will appear masked until you select Edit.

Starting July 21, the data will also be masked in Advanced lists, even for users with special access. Schools should use a list to export any data needed for integrations before July 21. If your school uses this data (via advanced lists) through SKY API, then update your integrations and customizations; the API won’t show this sensitive data.

Remember, only users who are granted special access can see:

• Visa status

• Visa number

• Visa type

• Visa issue date

• Visa expire date

• Passport expire date

• Passport number

• Social security number

We also recommend platform managers use the users list to review which users need special access. Show the Column for Special access and sort the column in descending order to show “yes” values first. From the list, platform managers can select a user’s name to the user’s profile in Core. Then, use the Access tab to Grant (or Remove) special access for the user.

The Bulk Set Emergency Contacts menu now supports role selection control, giving you more control over which roles are included when running the process.

To get started, open Bulk Set Emergency Contacts and select Bulk add contacts. In the dialog, use the new Roles selector to choose which roles to include. The Source of contacts label updates to reflect your selected roles, and the Preferred order label no longer repeats the role list since it is visible in the control above.

For information about recently added endpoints and other updates, view the School API and OneRoster API changelog.