Thank you for standing by. And welcome to Scholastic’s First Quarter Fiscal 2022 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that today’s conference may be recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your host, Senior Vice President, Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations, Gil Dickoff.

Thank you and good afternoon. Welcome to Scholastic’s first quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. Joining me on today’s call are Peter Warwick, Scholastic’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Cleary, our Chief Financial Officer. We have posted an investor presentation on our IR website at investor.scholastic.com, which we encourage you to download if you have not already done so. I would like to point out that certain statements made today will be forward-looking. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those arising from the continuing impact of COVID-19 on the company’s business operations. These forward-looking statements by their nature are uncertain and actual results may differ from those currently anticipated. In addition, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G and the reconciliations of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the company’s earnings release filed this afternoon on a Form 8-K, which has also been posted to our Investor Relations website. We encourage you to review the disclaimers in our press release and investor presentation, and to review the risk factors contained in our annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC. If you have any questions after today’s call, please send them directly to our IR e-mail address, investor_relations@scholastic.com. And now, I would like to turn the call over to Peter Warwick to begin this afternoon’s presentation.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. Back-to-school is always an important time at Scholastic and this year that’s no different. In fact, it may be one of the more important moments in our history. For many students and teachers, it’s been nearly two years since they entered the classroom together. Just this past week, I reached out to more than 2 million of our nation’s teachers with a message and a promise to them, that scholastic is not only a constant, that they can rely on but that we are eager to be side-by-side with them meeting their real time reading, literacy and learning needs. As one teacher responded, and I quote, every day is a new opportunity for my students to start and learn new things as they missed so much last school year. All of us at scholastic couldn’t agree more. As the first quarter of our new fiscal year showed, we have nimbly supported educators, families and children in literacy and reading. While this is historically a relatively quiet quarter for the company, we worked with fervor and a clear focus to increase access to books and reading over the summer and then seamlessly shifted to back-to-school offerings to help support learning, acceleration and social emotional healing. All of these efforts led to a 21% increase in revenue versus prior year and an improvement in our seasonal first quarter operating loss which should reduce by 44% compared to the same period last year. Trade Publishing and Education Solutions in particular, drove positive results for the company and we anticipate continued strength in both of these areas going forward. Ken will go into further details around our first quarter results. But overall, we are pleased that the momentum reported in our business from…

Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon. Today, I will refer to our adjusted results for the first quarter excluding one-time items, unless otherwise indicated. Please refer to our press release tables and SEC filings for a complete discussion of one-time severance and legal settlement costs. As we start the new fiscal year and our school, teacher, parent and student customers return to in-person learning, we are faced with both opportunities and challenges. As Peter mentioned, our first quarter is typically quiet for a school book fair and Book Clubs channels. However, strong performance in our education solutions and trade channels drove first quarter revenues to $259.8 million, compared to $215.2 million last year. Operating loss in the first quarter was $36.2 million, compared to an operating loss in the prior period of $45 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was a loss of $13 million, compared to a loss of $15.9 million last year and a loss per diluted share was $0.79, compared to a loss per diluted share of $0.90 in the prior fiscal quarter. Sales volume significantly outpaced higher employee-related costs in the current period. Employee costs were lower in the prior period as our employees were on furlough or reduced work week due to COVID-related actions through the end of August of last year. While our employee costs were higher than last year, we are pleased to see the uptick in our productivity and then in our cost containment efforts initiated last year continue to provide operating leverage as we have lowered our annual ongoing operating costs by approximately $50 million from historical levels and we are on track to achieve these savings. The company generated positive free cash flow for this quarter of $49.1 million, compared to free cash used of $34.9 million in the prior…

Thank you very much, Ken. As a reminder, we invite questions to be directed to our IR mailbox, investor_relations@scholastic.com. We appreciate every one’s time and continuing support. And as always, thank you for joining today’s call.

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.