Scholastic Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL ) held its fourth-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday.

Below is the complete transcript from the call.

This transcript is brought to you APIs.

For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

View the webcast at Summary Scholastic Corporation reported a 3% revenue decline for fiscal 2026, with operating income at $15.2 million and adjusted operating income rising 32% to $47.1 million.

The company completed sale-leaseback transactions, unlocking $400 million, and returned over $285 million to shareholders through repurchases and dividends.

Strategic initiatives included strengthening the Children's Book Group and enhancing Book Fairs, which saw a 5% growth due to increased fair count and revenue per fair.

Scholastic's Entertainment division showed promising growth with new projects, while Education faced revenue declines but expects stabilization in fiscal 2027.

For fiscal 2027, Scholastic projects a 2% to 4% revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA between $135 million and $145 million, driven by strong publishing pipelines and continued cost discipline.

Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and thank you for standing by.

Welcome to Scholastic's fourth quarter fiscal year 2026 results.

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 participate, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone.

You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised.

To withdraw the question, please press star 11 again.

Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jeffrey Mathews, Executive Vice President, Chief Growth Officer and President, Scholastic Education.

Please go ahead, sir.

Jeffrey Mathews, Interim President, Scholastic Education Hello and welcome everyone to Scholastic's fiscal 2026 fourth quarter earnings call.

Today on the call I'm joined by Peter Warwick, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Haji Glover, our Chief Financial Officer.

As usual, we posted the companion investor presentation on our IR website at investor.scholastic.com, which you may download now if you have not already done so.

We would like to point out that certain statements made today will be forward-looking.

These forward-looking statements, by their nature, are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated.

In addition, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G.

The reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures may be found in the company's earnings release and accompanying financial tables filed this afternoon on a Form 8-K.

The earnings release has also been posted to our investor relations website.

We encourage you to review the disclaimers in the release and investor presentation, and to review the risk factors disclosed in the company's annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC.

Should you have any questions after today's call, please send them directly to our IR email address investorrelations@scholastic.com.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Peter Warwick to begin this afternoon's presentation.

Peter Warwick, CEO Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for joining us.

Fiscal 2026 was an important year for Scholastic.

It demonstrated the earnings power of the more focused company we've been building and the progress we've made evolving a trusted century-old company to scale its impact and create long-term value for our shareholders and all stakeholders.

This progress reflects a multi-year transformation of Scholastic's governance, organization, strategy, and balance sheet.

Last year we refreshed our board, strengthened our management team, reorganized to unlock efficiencies and create more integrated growth platforms, sharpened accountability across the company, and took major steps to make our balance sheet more efficient and enhance our shareholder returns.