The acquisition, which builds on the PLATO heritage of innovation in education Technology adds a number of new products and services to the PLATO product line to help school districts meet state learning standards and benchmarks requirements.
PLATO is acquiring all the shares of privately held TeachMaster for $1.5 million in cash, 18,327 shares of PLATO stock and additional consideration not to exceed $750,000. The additional consideration will be paid only upon TeachMaster achieving its fiscal years 2002 and 2003 revenue and operating profit targets.
TeachMaster’s founder and President, David Braswell will continue to lead TeachMaster’s efforts. Mr. Braswell has over 20 years of education experience as a teacher, principal, superintendent, school board member, and entrepreneur. Mr. Braswell will report to John Murray, President and CEO of PLATO Learning. TeachMaster and its employees will remain in Phoenix, Arizona.
Mr. Murray commented, There is increasing demand for high quality, standards-based, state and local correlated curricula. Superintendents tell us they want teachers to have access to online databases that fully align assessment questions, instructional content, learning exercises and lesson plans with their state learning and testing standards. They also want teachers to have the ability to automatically manage these important resources, on demand, as they instructionally plan and, based on each student’s need. Mr. Murray continued, With the integration of TeachMaster’s 49 state database of over 48,000 state and national standards, and more than 125,000 associated benchmarks, into and aligned with our comprehensive core curriculum products, PLATO is positioned to be the leading provider of both the tools and services needed to achieve meaningful standards-driven results in the classroom.
Mr. Braswell commented, We believe the combination of TeachMaster standards driven products and the PLATO courseware and learning management systems will create a powerful new K-12 solution for providing comprehensive, interactive, standards-referenced classroom instruction. PLATO Learning’s heritage of innovation, instructionally sound multimedia courseware, quality service and support, as well as its sustained growth and profitability, make it unique in the educational software industry. We are very excited to join the PLATO Learning family and to team with both PLATO and educators from around the world to design, build and implement educational software and learner management solutions that will truly make a difference in a standards driven education environment.
SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE
