Stride, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Stride, Inc. First Quarter Fiscal 2022 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 Mr. Tim Casey.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Welcome to Stride's first quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2022. 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 Stride Investor Relations website. Please be advised that the discussion of our financial results may include certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures is provided in the earnings release issued this afternoon and can also be found 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 as 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 will answer any questions you may have. I will now turn the call over to James. James?

Thanks, Tim. Each summer, as we prepare for the upcoming school year, we face operational and logistical demands to support the needs of millions of potential customers and thousands of teachers and support staff. These past two summers have proven even more challenging as a result of the ongoing global pandemic. Our country has been facing disruptions in the supply chain, shortages of workers across industries, uncertainty in the workplace, and renewed fears of inflation, among many other difficulties. In spite of this, I have great faith in our country, our ability to persevere and create opportunities through adversities. We are resilient, adaptive, Innovative, compassionate, opinionated, proud, and sometimes disagree. But we are always united. And as we navigate these recent challenges, we are evolving. We're being forced to rethink certain norms. And one of those has been our approach to education. I hope we now realize that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to education, to training, or to workforce development. Certainly, some of the traditional methods work for many. But we need to ensure we are providing choices for everybody, choices about how and where we learn, how employers recruit, how we educate and train the workforce, and how we deliver opportunities for those seeking new paths. Over 20 years ago, STRIDE was founded on the premise that students and families should have a choice in their education. The pandemic has made this mission more critical than ever before. We remain committed to ensuring that we are providing a best-in-class experience across the range of customers we serve, from early elementary to adult workforce solutions. And we want to make sure that these educational options are available to as many learners as possible. The increasing demand for educational and training options continues to fuel our business. The pandemic and the resulting disruption across schools and districts has led to a surge of support for school choice. Total support for school choice has increased to almost 75% of the population. The pandemic raised awareness for parents about their students' education, and many recognized that they are not getting what they need from their existing school. And that surge in interest spans private schools, voucher programs, virtual schools, and other similar programs. And specifically, interest in virtual education has seen dramatic increases. In large part, this was because so many were forced into it during the pandemic. And while the experience was not always positive, it absolutely opened the eyes of many to the benefits of a virtual model. And for us, this has translated into what we believe is a structural long-term increase in the demand for our products and services. In fact, peak website traffic this year surpassed the traffic we saw last year at the height of the pandemic. We're seeing well over a million unique visitors to our websites each month and growing. And they are a more educated consumer. Conversion rates for those who apply to our program are at a multi-year high. We attribute this in large part to the increase in awareness. Families that apply to our program know what they were looking for, and so they convert at higher rates. This is an important trend for us over the longer term. And as families become more comfortable with virtual education and Strides experience, it opens up other opportunities for us to offer other institutional and consumer offerings. And while conversion rates have improved, so have conversion times. Families both know what they want, and we are also making it easier for them to enroll. Our focus on the consumer experience and customer journey is just beginning, and if these early trends are any indication of what we can expect, we are going to deliver some really exciting customer experience improvements in the coming months and years ahead. Our roadmap of new products and customer improvements is more robust, than it has been in the over eight years that I've been with the company. Be on the lookout for some exciting new product announcements during the upcoming year. However, this demand hasn't come without some additional challenges. As many of you have likely experienced, there are labor shortages in many industries, and education is not immune. Teacher shortages have been a real threat to the US education system for many years, and the pandemic has only exacerbated this risk. We're thankful for the thousands of wonderful teachers we manage. but these shortages have limited our ability to enroll new students in some states. Given the dissatisfaction many teachers experience in traditional schools and the high satisfaction rates we see for the teachers that we manage, we hope that they consider us as an option. Particularly with vaccination requirements, accessibility, and age restrictions, some teachers just don't feel comfortable in their current environment. And so over time, we will be looking to shift more and more teachers to online programs, where they have greater flexibility, impact, and reach than they have in their current roles. Another trend that we see accelerating is the focus on career training and workforce development. We desperately need skilled workers, and many high school students are realizing that their future success does not need to be tied to a four-year college degree. This fall, our STRI career programs for middle and high school students enrolled 42,000 students, a 36% increase from last year. It's also three times the level we were at just two years ago. And our surveys for career learning demand are even more positive than overall virtual education. Even as interest in virtual options has increased, career learning interest continues to outpace it by multiples in the middle and high school space. We think that this interest, coupled with the opening of new programs and new states, can sustain strong growth in this business over the long term. I think the investment community was rightfully skeptical of our ability to grow after last year's pandemic boom. And make no mistake, we continue to see a positive impact on our business from the ongoing pandemic uncertainty. But we also believe that there is an ongoing structural shift in education, and we are the digital leader in the space. We believe that positions us to thrive over the long term across a broad spectrum of product and service offerings. For this year, that means we expect to grow both our top and bottom line, and we believe we are on pace or better for the long-term goals we set out for ourselves just last November. Tim will provide more details on this in just a minute. I also wanted to highlight one of our new product offerings for this school year. As many of you know, younger students were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Younger students were less likely to attend school consistently and were more likely to suffer from significant learning loss. Additionally, supporting younger students during at-home learning can be a challenge for families. We recognize the particular difficulties of this age group even prior to the pandemic and have been working on an entirely new design for our K through five course catalog. Our new programs are built specifically to support more independent learning and allow parents and families to play a more supporting role in a child's education. We believe these new courses will allow for deeper engagement and better academic outcomes. And lastly, while COVID was rightfully receiving much of the attention over the last year, There have been other catastrophic disruptions. For example, in September, Hurricane Ida hit the Gulf Coast, and a significant number of students were displaced from their homes and schools. Our team quickly mobilized to offer a free, private virtual program for these students that is now serving hundreds of families. Proud of the team for this effort. It's doing what I call absolute right, and it's a core principle for stride. Thank you for your time today. Now I'll pass the call over to Tim Medina to discuss our quarter of results and fiscal 22 guidance. Tim?