Stride, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Stride, Inc. Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Timothy Casey. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Welcome to Stride's fourth quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2021. With me on today's call are James Rue, Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Medina, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, today's conference call and webcast are accompanied by a slide presentation that can be found on the Investor Relations website. Please be advised that this call may include certain non-GAAP financial measures during the discussion of our financial results. A reconciliation of these measures is provided in the earnings release issued this afternoon, which is also posted in the investors section of our website. In addition to historical information, today's call may also involve forward-looking statements. The company's actual results could differ materially from any forward-looking statements due to several important factors described in the company's latest SEC filings. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during this call. Following our prepared remarks, we'll answer any questions you may have. I will now turn the call over to James. James?

Thank you, and good afternoon. We all appreciate what a difficult year this has been. Even in the face of this incredible adversity, Stride has been able to thrive. And we've only been able to do so because of the commitment of our thousands of team members. These folks have been dedicated to our customers, and the families that need an alternative approach to education now more than ever before. So I want to start by saying thank you to all of our dedicated staff. This was also a year in which the country and the world took notice of online and distance learning in a mainstream way. But the experience was not always positive. Across the country, many schools struggled with uncertainty and inconsistency for students and families as they vacillated between online and in-person instruction. Thankfully, our 20 years of experience was able to deliver a seamless experience for our customers. Our teachers, platforms, content, and curricula were all developed to meet this need. Everybody now knows what online learning is. Many have not embraced it. Others realize its potential if done the right way. We stand alone. having served millions of students in our online bond and while many schools struggled with learning loss and deteriorating test scores our results outpaced them in the face of onboarding a record number of families for our programs i'll get to how we are training for this fall in a minute first i want to review some of our fiscal 2021 accomplishments by almost any measure we had a record year by a long We helped over a quarter of a million full-time learners, and millions of other users became interested in our programs. Learning loss became the norm, except in the schools we managed. No wonder when national data showed an overall enrollment decline of 1.5 million students. We published our first-ever ESG report, backed by a number of key initiatives. A new partnership with the National Association of Black Male Educators designed to increase the diversity of teachers across the country. A program with Teach for America to share practical online experience to student teachers. Our We Stand Together College Scholarship, a $10 million multi-year commitment to support underrepresented students. But we are not relying on the tailwinds of the pandemic to set our long-term path forward. We rebranded our company from K-12 to STRIVE to ensure that our name better reflects the commitment to providing educational opportunities for learners of all levels. We acquired two high-growth, higher-margin companies to expand our adult career learning offerings. We held an investor day to outline our strategy and growth trajectory through fiscal year 2025, a trajectory that I believe we are well on track to hit. And we raised almost $360 million through a convertible note offering to facilitate further investment in both organic and inorganic growth. In our general education business, we saw student enrollment increase by almost 50%. With all the uncertainty this past year, we saw dramatic improvements in retention in both our general education as well as our career education business. And we did not see the mass withdrawal of students in the second half of the school year as many states began to reopen their brick and mortar schools. This is a testament to the stickiness and value propositions of our programs. As we've mentioned previously, students enrolled in our career learning programs tend to retain at a higher level than our general education students. And we believe this trend will continue. We also had a record number of re-registration families indicating that they will be returning for the fall. Our career learning business finished the year with over $250 million in revenue. This is an increase from less than 10 million just four years ago. A 150% compounded annual growth. This year we saw growth of over 125% to almost 30,000 students. These programs offer a career path without the need for an expensive college degree. And we are increasing the programs from our MedCerts acquisition that we will offer to high school students for certificates in the healthcare industry. Both our MedCerts and tech elevator acquisitions continue to grow and contribute to the bottom line and are exceeding our expectations from when we purchased them. They are high growth, high margin market opportunity platforms for us that we will continue to leverage into other areas of our business, particularly our high school programs. We will continue our focus on IT and healthcare training because these industries are projected to add more than two and a half million new positions in the US by 2029. On the other hand, our galvanized acquisition has not performed according to our plan. We've restructured this business and believe we now have a glide path to both renewed growth and profitability heading into next year. We will also look for ways to invest behind and expand our adult learning offerings with a lens toward making career learning a $1 billion plus business. In June, we released our inaugural ESG Initiatives Report. As an education and career learning company, we have a significant opportunity to help achieve global education, workforce, and diversity and inclusion goals. All of our ESG initiatives are based on the four cornerstones outlined in the report. Expanding lifelong learning for today's competitive workforce, supporting racial and socioeconomic equity and inclusion, fostering transparent leadership, governance, and professional development, and contributing to a more sustainable world. For me, our focus on learner outcomes is the most important aspect of all our ESG efforts. Stride is in a unique position to influence the lives of millions of students of all ages. Not many other companies have that kind of impact or carry that responsibility, and we don't take that responsibility lightly. By now, everyone is aware of the significant shortages impacting the workforce. Stride is well positioned to help alleviate that shortage. To that end, we have set 10-year goals that are driven by learner outcomes. So by 2030, our goals are to graduate over 100,000 students from our STRI career high school program, to graduate hundreds of thousands of students from our adult programs, and to achieve leading graduation and learning growth rates for over a million students. Our report contains a lot more specific information on our ESG efforts. I encourage everyone to read it. It can be found on our investor relations website, and there's a direct link in today's earnings presentation. Now I want to turn to fiscal year 22. The long-term trends, prospects for our general education and career learning businesses both remain tremendous. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised consumer awareness around the need for and the benefits of online education in grades K through 12 and in adulthood. While it doesn't work for everyone, many students and families have realized that online learning and the flexibility it provides is a preferred alternative. Increased awareness and openness to different options to meet educational needs fundamentally provides for a long-term tailwind for all aspects of our business. As we do every year, we will provide formal fiscal 2022 guidance during our first quarter earnings call in October. So while we're not providing guidance right now, I do want to provide some insight into how the current enrollment season is trending. Even now in August, we're still less than halfway through the volume of our typical enrollment season. And this means that these trends could shift in the coming weeks. Additionally, the pandemic has increased uncertainty around all these metrics, so please do not extrapolate what I'm about to say. We have not seen the mass return to remote schools that many have predicted for students. We're currently exceeding the number of re-registrations that we saw during fiscal 21 and in previous years. Right now, we're well ahead of where we would be normally in enrollments versus pre-pandemic. Awareness for our offerings is at an all-time high. pandemic helped to drive awareness, and we no longer need to explain what distance or virtual learning is to families. They get it, and now they just need to choose it. Conversion rates from our new league are at an all-time high, so when families seek us out, they are more likely to enroll. We believe that health and safety continue to be top priorities for families, and we're seeing that and we're seeing even stronger demand in states where the Delta variant has surged. Our goal is clear, it's to grow every year. Importantly, we remain on track to achieving the long-term revenue and profitability targets that we outlined during the investor day last fall. We still anticipate achieving revenue of $1.9 to $2.2 billion adjusted operating income of $250 to $350 million by the year 2025. Thank you for your time today. Now I'll hand the call over to Tim to discuss our full year 2021 results. Tim?